Acknowledgents
Many more people have contributed to this work than are mentioned. I have learned to say nothing of the living lest they object to the selection. Even the surviors of the dead have objected in their behalf. But you are all here. As for the dead, living still when we think of you witnesses, I have learned to speak respectfully for there are so many biography assassinations among the poets where the better they are the worse they fare. Only the greatest miscreants are excused. The effort here to see them as they may have seen themselves.
Riches
All families inherit a particular genome which if known can be a map to allay modern fears. If you know those who went before made the voyage, survived the landing, settled the land, lived through the Revolution, the Civil War, the ice age, the pestilence of 1918, WWI, WWII and navigated the 60s assassinations, the mills, the universities, the corporations and the computer age, the identity from living all these histories, stories and circumstances, can comfort even as we differentiate, especially in the knowledge they rehearsed that there is no testing taken you but such as is common to man, but God is faithful and will make a way to escape so you will be able to bear it.
This Roster of Families becomes a testing ground of American history and political theories like the Fourth Turning. All the social dynamic claims of the media listed lettered generations Z, M, X, is intended to leave them adrift without a ground of comparison. But this ground exists in the ten generations we investigate here, 1717-2021. By close readings of agriculture and social practices we can judge the impact of the Revolutionary War sweeping over Germantown and out to Worcester, and of the Civil War by Andrew Mack's long walk home from the draft board just in time to attend the birth of his twins, of the coming mini ice age with the Maunder (1645-1715), and the Dalton (1790 to 1830) sunspot minimums on agricultural practices, buildings, barns and cemeteries, the fear of immigrant populations, pandemics like the Spanish Flu of 1918, and add to Benjamin Rush’s
accounts of Yellow Fever of 1793, computed with the language diversities by the prejudice against German peoples all along to WWI, II and following. Social practices encompass also the creation of institutions of schools, cemeteries and orphanages from the start in that region, now outside Philadelphia, settled by Mennonites who were assisted by Hans George Reiff in the founding. Gifts recorded on the first page of the Skippack Alms Book by his wife Anna, for the building of a meeting house of that time in the 18th century connect in a long arc Aunt Elizabeth Reiff, first female elder in her Presbyterian assembly, going on the roof of city hall in downtown Philadelphia to watch for planes in 1942 in the twentieth. These history goes from the memory of draft exercises from the War of 1812, to Philip and Harvey Mack conscientious objectors serving as an ambulance driver in France in WWI and working as a carpenter for the Quakers in its reconstruction, after to his brother Philip enlisting as second lieutenant just as the war ended and not serving in WW I, to the black out curtains in the childhood of AE Reiff in WW II in Philadelphia, to duck and cover exercises in schools. And because every family grows by the accretion of marriage, he added to this history by marrying a woman whose father, Carl Carlson, was a waist gunner in a B22 with 25 missions before his plane was shot from the sky and he served 11 months in German prison camps till the war's end. Truly is you scratch the surface of any of these lives you will find remarkable events, testings and trials. As every grand solar minimum is associated with 7.0-8.2+
earthquakes as well as eruptions, seismic events and extreme weathers, how to prepare for these and what to expect in infrastructure damage, to keep safe amid crop losses and intensifications takes a lot of air out of those dire threats when we see how these ancestors thrived. Is it necessary to say they were people of character?
How that character did or did not fare in the midst of paradigm shifts and points of view is paramount. Over 300 years from 1717 to 2021 there have been plenty of shifts of fashion too, from whether to button a coat, drive a car or wear a mask, a cell phone or get a vax, but the people themselves continue to have been farmers, if you call farming being family practice docs and teachers, and traders who live by their wits, if you think that's what business execs do, and speculative philosophers. The character of these people resisted the philosophy of the world entering their thoughts. They favored The Wandering Soul and Arndt's True Christianity as encouragements of inner life. Presumably Mennonites still suspect technology in some degree but resisting a phone upgrade does not make "a
chosen and separate people!” If Mennonites who charge that the world acts like Mannequins are prophetic to the extreme, mimicking mannequins is exactly what Mennonites model to the rest of the wired world, just like they wore wooden knives in their belts in Switzerland to mock murder. Even if they're no longer Mennonites, like attracts like, and the genome, even shorn of faith retains vestiges of these attitudes in the way they protect their children.
Those 18th century ancestors Conrad and Jacob Reiff, their wives and children condition these attitudes strength together with the 19th century Mennonite Bechtels and Macks with every other instance. We all get to play a part.
How could the humane community spirit of Jacob the Elder's father Hans George be
revisited so many times is like a complication of a sport, existing before in fathers and mothers, the X chromosome adding the mother's fathers. The 1020 genetic codes in ten generations are the sample we explain. Don't repeat history, even if it was good, but do remember. Remember, improve, but keep moving in the gift of the Y. Traits will will insist no matter what the dilution. The gene tamperers are hurt by this. For how could the force of personality with genetic and other causes, repeat again and again down the generations from 1717 to today? To express this in a sound bite, the progress of Y is an XY since chromosomes are pairs. We are not other. These pairs together make the person, so there is no X by itself. If there seem to be continuing Y traits they are not illusion. The repeated history we seek is real. To sum the meaning it is peace. Reiff means peace. If it also means war, you can fulfill the understanding that it is its pair.
After
living as an antiquary myself for some years I landed at dawn
the day after Christmas 2004 with son Aeyrie to pack the Bechtel, Mack, Reiff estate. A case in the
attic held books from the library of Anna Bechtel Mack's great
grandfather, Abraham Bechtel, her grandmother, Mary Longacre Bechtel
and her grandfather, John B. Bechtel, signed and inscribed. The books, in German, were found
next to trunks of embroidered linens of four generations of Howard Reiff's mother's family Margaret Gehman (1833-1860) and father,
John S. Rosenberger (1824-1861) who had left two daughters, but even if Catherine G. Rosenberger (1857-1883) was
orphaned at six, the show towels and linens back to 1772 were preserved. It is a very tale out of Van Allen Bradley's Gold in Your Attic. All this being known I could not help adding to the books an English version of the classic Wandering Soul, (Harrisburg: Theo. F. Scheffer, 1859) and A Description of the New Creature by Abraham Godshalk (1838), but now you can get it online..
My early contemplation of this world had begun sixty years before in that attic where I used to sleep with the books on visits to this grandmother's house in Media, Pa. from
the age of four. Oil paintings were stored on the tops of old
wardrobes above, left over from Anna's daughter Elizabeth. Full sheets of watercolors
and wood blocks were later discovered with hand drawings in notebooks
and sketches.
Three Mack Brothers
Henry Mack and his wife Elizabeth's Mennonite songbooks
lay signed side by side In that attic with also a copy of Henry's inventory of
graves of the Old Hereford Mennonite Cemetery, Record of Tombstone Inscriptions / Old Mennonite Cemetery of the Hereford Congregation of Mennonites (1934). In her 90s this water colorist aunt gave me two books of
ledgers of her grandfather Henry S. Mack,1870-1900 that he had kept from the age of 21. Following that excerpts of a journal of his brother, Peter S. Mack
(1842-1879) emerged. He had been pastor of the Zion Lutheran Church of Hummelstown, PA. These were discovered from a Hummelstown library. Further, translations of 49 the letters of Bishop Andrew S. Mack in the Jacob B. Mensch Collection were elicited from the Old Mennonite translator Issac Horst. Hence, writing by all three brothers emerged, who were also lifelong musicians. The postcards from France during WWI of Anna's brother, Harvey Mack also surfaced. He drove an ambulance like E. E. Cummings,
and stayed after the war to work as a carpenter in the French
reconstruction, and thereafter remained a carpenter the rest of his life. Uncle
Harvey, born the same day as this writer and the mother of his grandchildren, was a large encouragement to
my father before and after his father's premature death in 1927. Harvey had
also a ministry of reconciliation in France because he was a German speaker. He
was given German POWs to shepherd and repatriate whom he revisited later in life. See A Service of Love in Wartime: American Friends Relief Work in Europe, 1917-1919 (Appendix, 275).
In the beginning of this investigation, driving in Skippack in 1974 before going to London, I had found copies of the magazine Goshenhoppen Region at the first stop and contacted its editor, Arthur Lawton, the next day and went on a dig with him and his students at the Jacob Reiff Farm. You will have to look in your own life for the X chromosome, but it is remarkable that my brothers and I lived through important aspects of Mennonite passages of life: 1) non-resistance 2) service among alien or deprived peoples 3) agricultural experience, 4) separation from the world, but with no indoctrination. If we can compare the difficulty of agriculture in an ice age with nonresistance in an age of mind control, Mennonites meant by nonresistance that they would not participate in killing and war. To the dissolution of the United States, a subject previously unthought, nonresistance means to not participate in all the myriad schemes of intelligence upon the herd. This becomes a separation from the world. Deleting Facebook as one scion did. Without knowing then, my generation was the tenth generation of those ancestors who emigrated to Philadelphia in the first decades of the eighteenth century or before, part of a homogeneous population of Swiss-German immigrants from the Palatinate, initially Reformed, then predominantly Mennonite, who intermarried among people like themselves for nine succeeding generations. My father, Jacob Howard Reiff, was the first to marry out of this community. His children, the tenth generation who lived in America, began with merely formal lives as Mennonites or none at all. I was the last, consecrated at six months, 29 Mar 1942, by John J. Henert, Pastor of the First Mennonite Church at Reese and Diamond Streets in Philadelphia where our great grandfather Henry Mack used to lead the singing.
This was the only Mennonite church inside the city at the beginning of the 20th century. The nineth and eighth generations of the Macks and Reiffs, my father and grand fathers had been members there. Those who worshiped at “New” First Mennonite Church of Philadelphia however were themselves a step removed from their rural “Old” Mennonite families who still lived in Skippack and Worcester. My tenth generation was a further step removed when our parents became Presbyterian and joined our mothers' Tioga church. Shortly following the consecrations of their first two sons, these
parents joined the mother's Tioga Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia.Children of the tenth generation were not taught any Mennonite doctrines or customs, old or new, but the children of the 11th in Phoenix attended Phoenix Christian Grade School right down the street.
Not to take religion as such a deciding factor, even if it socially is, the values of these people were real. It was involved faith and community.
 |
| AE on left, and brother Jay. |
My grandmother, Anna Bechtel Mack Reiff (1880-1970) had taken refuge at five with her Mennonite
uncle, bishop Andrew Mack (1836-1917) after her mother,
Elisabeth Bechtel died after the birth of her third child. Also a farmer, cabinet maker, farmer, stone puller, forty nine letters, 1870-1906,
of Andrew Mack remain. This Anna and her daughter Elizabeth became the important curators who transmitted these events to the future, but after her father Henry remarried Anna got only a sixth grade education and
had to work the farm. Desperate for escape, with an innate sense of idealism
and duty, Anna Bechtel Mack, with claims to be A Mennonite Tailor, outdid every expectation in serendipity.
These "New" Mennonites and "Old.” are documented. The urban New Mennonites, Jacob L. Reiff and his son Howard R. Reiff, were members of First Mennonite of Philadelphia, “New” was the proviso that both had been "Old" Mennonites, now separated by their leaving the land and moving to the city. Philosophical differences with the old came from the insistence of Howard's wife, Anna, a daughter of families deep in Mennonite pastors and bishops, Bechtels and Macks. At the time of Anna’s choice for the new in 1906, her father, Henry Mack, had also moved to the city and already begun a butter and egg business. Both Reiff and Mack families, who had known each other in the country, worshipped together in the city. “Old” Mennonite made into “New,” apologists for the new say that
the public school system, choosing ministers by lot, plain dress of the
clergy, their advancing age, the growing use of English, mechanical
innovation and the wind of change led to the divergence (Good, 13-14).
The 1024 examples of ten generations whose roots entwine these families remain in records as land owners, trustees, executors, deacons, ministers within thirty miles of where we were born in Germantown. The English won the cultural conflict in the war of language, but the unwritten flowers, books, paintings, pottery, letters, manuscripts and furniture of that family made them rich remained. Before I knew any of this, unbeknownst, the last sentence of my dissertation of 1975, cited Donne's Essays in Divinity, "O the depth of the riches of his wisdom; and so, after, The unsearchable riches of Christ; And for the consummation of all, The riches of his Glory."
“My father was always willing to pay a bill which he did know was correct in all its items. I can recall my father sent me to Norristown for a load of feed with 3 horses and in making the turn at Jeffersonville, through my carelessness, I tore off another man’s wheel of his wagon. The man went to my father and told him what I done and demanded him to pay the damage and father was willing. As I grew older I came to realize that extreme carefulness has been one of the foundation stones of my father’s success” (Letter of 27 Jan 1929).
We surmise that Uncle George obtained his father’s land in Worcester (Methacton) after his father’s death in 1879. The Worcester Mennonite burial ground there, c. 1744, is the final resting place of Abraham and Jacob L. and probably other Reiffs, along with many soldiers who died after the Battle of Germantown of the Revolutionary War. Christopher Sauer, the polemicist and printer of the German Bible is buried there with other first settlers.
A signal detail occurs in that Worcester Mennonite Church where the name "Abraham Reiff" is inscribed upon a beam in the attic of the third meetinghouse. Such actualities are always wonderful, like the ornate signature of John Bechtel we will encounter below in The Wandering Soul or the signature of Jacob and Anna Reiff alleged to have been carved in the old mill in Skippack (James Y. Heckler, The History of Harleysville and Lower Salford Township, 1886, 29): "When the old mill was torn down a board was found stuck away on the attic bearing the date "Built by Jacob and Anna Reiff, 1743." Sometime prior to 1771, maybe as early as 1739, that first meetinghouse had been used as a school, then rebuilt about 1804 and again in 1873. Abraham Reiff was a member of the building committee of this third meetinghouse when he so inscribed his name (The Perkiomen Region [PR] I, 104).
Abraham Schwenk Reiff was one of three designated trustees for the receipt of land in 1860 when that congregation added to the "Mennonist Society a burying ground of Worcester" (Wenger, 107). He also served as trustee, August 9, 1873, for the purchase of the land where the third meetinghouse was built. So his name is preserved in relation to the Mennonites three ways, trustee for the cemetery addition, trustee for land for the new building and member of the building committee. He had been ordained in 1877 as a deacon at Worcester "as an old man" (Wenger, 99) and served until his death two years later. His son, George L. Reiff (12/8/1846 – 10/8/1932), took his place, the above “Uncle George,” who served this church as Deacon from 1881 until his death in 1932.
All these generations knew one another. Mennonite Bishop Andrew Mack, refers to George L. Reiff’s advice in his letter of 8 Oct 1874, “that is what George Reiff said we should do.” The church, school and burial ground in Worcester is notable as a Schwenkfelder settlement that holds antiquarian interest today, but Abraham Reiff had originally lived in Skippack where preceding families of Reiffs lived.
George Clemens Reiff (1/14/1793 – 3/4/1860)
George Clemens Reiff married Maria Magdalena Bauer Schwenk (7/19/1794 – 3/28/1875) on 30 April 1814, but George Clemens Reiff, the father of Abraham S. Reiff, must be distinguished from two contemporary cousins, both named George Clemens Reiff. Two brothers, George and Jacob, married two sisters, Elizabeth and Sarah Clemens, daughters of Garret Clemens. Each of these named a son George. The George C. Reiff (6/13/1804 – 11/16/1886), who married Elizabeth Detweiler in 1830, was from this genealogy a cousin. He was the son of Jacob Hendricks Reiff, a storekeeper in Skippackville, and Sarah Clemens. Younger than his cousin by 11 years. He is mentioned by Heckler in his History of Lower Salford (87) and in the History of Franconia Township as living in Skippackville and as having married the oldest daughter of Abraham Detweiler (d. 12/10/1830). There is a letter of his in the Henry S. Dotterer collection at the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (Riffe, 108).
The older George C. Reiff, father of Abraham S. Reiff, married Maria Magdalena Bauer Schwenk (7/19/1794 – 3/28/1875) on 30 April 1814. George Clemens Reiff was a trustee for purchase of Mennonite land in Skippack as his son Abraham had been in Worcester He was one of "three Mennonite trustees, Jacob F. Kulp, Daniel Landes, and George Reiff," who executed a trust for land donated by Issac Kulp to build the new meetinghouse erected by the Old Mennonites of Skippack in 1848” (Wenger, 99).
The New Meetinghouse
This new meetinghouse illustrates the division between Old and the New Mennonites. The seceding "new" Mennonites had taken over the meetinghouse in Skippack which the undivided congregation had built in 1844 (Wenger, 97), where both Old and then Old and New met for a time. But the "Old" original group refused to prosecute the expropriation of their property from scruples of conscience against litigation. They built a new building in 1848, slightly smaller than the old, although the deed was not made until August 21, 1849 (Wenger, 99). This was the land that George Reiff served as trustee.
According to John F. Funk (1878) the building of a new meetinghouse illustrates what true Mennonites were all about. It also is a means to understand the division between Old and New in the first place in 1847.
“During the difficulties which occurred in the church, in eastern Pennsylvania, in 1847-48 on account of the disobedience and innovations of John H. Oberholtzer, in Bucks County, and the Hunsicker faction in Skippack, Montgomery County, there still remained, in the Old Church, so much love to God and the teachings of the Savior as to enable them, by the grace of God, to fulfill the teachings of Christ in a most noble manner, and leave to the world one of the most glorious examples of self-denial and devotion to their religious principles, presented to us in modern times.”
“The new factions claimed the old meeting-house and were determined to have it at all events. The property was one of considerable value and justly belonged to the Old Church, and any impartial judge or jury would have, without any scruples, freely accorded it to them, had they presented their claims, but instead of doing so, they chose rather to obey the scriptural injunctions “not to resist evil, and of him that taketh away thy goods, not to ask them again,” and quietly, leaving the new factions in possession, they purchased other grounds and built themselves a new house.” (Funk,128)
This account highlights the unworldly Old Mennonite belief as well as the deep interrelations of the Mennonite Reiffs. In acting as trustee for the new building in Skippack, George C. Reiff was doing exactly what John B. Bechtel, Anna Bechtel Mack's grandfather, did in Hereford, when, at the 1847 division, he became the Old Mennonite pastor by lot at age 41. John Bechtel’s granddaughter, Anna Mack, was subsequently married George C. Reiff’s great grandson, Howard R. Reiff. Neither ancestor knew the other, but their children Anna and Howard did, but it shows the tide when they became new Mennonites in 1911.
The Old Mennonites of Skippack became the "Upper Skippack" congregation, but while they surrendered the meetinghouse they kept the Skippack Alms Book, a record of alms money with annual audits conducted yearly from 1738, the oldest such record of its kind in Pennsylvania. This Alms Book gives “a list of all the ordained men of the Skippack circuit since 1738" (Wenger, 97) and records the signatures of the three Reiffs of succeeding generations, starting with George [C.] Reiff who kept the Alms Book from 1835 to 1842, signing it four times (Wenger, 103). His son Abraham S. Reiff of the Worcester congregation, part of the Skippack circuit, signed the Alms Book three times, from 1877-79. Abraham's son, George L. Reiff, as noted, signed 34 times. But on the first page it reports a gift of Anna Reiff, wife of Hans George, in 1738.Thus the Alms Book and meetinghouse document four generations. Executor
George C. Reiff also served as executor of Abraham Schwenk (5/25/1759 – 8/6/1843), his father-in-law, and was named as guardian of the six children of Schwenk’s deceased son, also named Abraham. He is simply called, George Reiff:
"Gaurdian[sic.] of the persons and Estates of the minor children of my late Deceased Son Abraham named as follows, to wit, Isaac, Abraham, David, William, Margaret & Sarah—from the first Day of April last past, until each of the said minor Children shall attain the age of 21 years.—The sum of $500 being due to each of them on the said first day of April, and in the hands of the said George Reiff; and of the further sum or sums that will be due to them immediately after my decease…" (Strassburger, 301) We know that George Reiff adequately fulfilled that trust, because in “1854 others of the heirs acknowledged the receipt of their full inheritance from George Reiff…"(Strassburger, 303).
Nonresistence
Before his marriage in 1814, George C. Reiff was listed as a private in the War of 1812. This might explain his intimacy with his father in law, who was a Sergeant Seventh Class in the Philadelphia County Militia during the Revolution and in the Montgomery County Militia in 1786. That Abraham Schwenk had then been "a tanner in Germantown at the time of the [Revolutionary] war, nineteen years old, a tall, fine man, he was under age, but because of his size the officers did not know it. At the battle of Germantown he went upstairs in a house as he was wounded, where a woman said that British were coming. He replied, 'Let the devils come,' and he took a large stick from the fireplace and drove them back" (Strassburger, 296).
George C. Reiff as a Private in the War of 1812 (Captain John Wentz's Company, Sixth Class, Fifty-first Regiment), might seem contradictory when, "apart from believers' baptism, the most distinctive doctrine of the Mennonites is their Biblical nonresistance" (Wenger, 57). That is, that "a Christian may not participate in, or support, war or violence in any form whatever" (Wenger, 57). but Mennonites were sometimes said to have served when they did not, but were included in the rolls anyway. For example, Philip Geisinger, Henry Geisinger and John Geisinger had petitioned the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1778 for exemption from military service (Wenger, 60-2) and been penalized. Historian Wenger notes "about a dozen and half graves at the Saucon burying ground on which are Grand Army of the Republic, G. A. R. markers of the Revolutionary War, including …Johannes Geissinger (1739- 1811)…Henrich Geisinger (1737-1817)…Philip Geissinger (1732-1809) and Abraham Geissinger, (1749-1825). But as John L. Ruth says, these are “the crowning irony which was to mark the memories of Jacob Yoder, John Geissinger, and their friends who sacrificed all they had to separate themselves from the Revolutionary War for conscience’ sake. For all their pains, their graves are yearly marked with American flags placed by modern patriotic organizations, who, having carelessly read the rosters of Colonel Siegfried’s militia, in their myth-making zeal designate these defenseless, dispossessed Christians as soldier heroes of the American Revolution.” (Ruth, 173) Of course there were also many Geissingers and Rosenbergers in the Saucon Valley not in the Mennonite Church. Some of those people were imprisoned for not serving.
Mennonite military service seems to occur in the life of Bishop Heinrich Kolb Hunsicker (3/7/1752-7/8/1836), who while being both a farmer, a minister of the Lower Skippack Mennonites and a Bishop, was also listed as a member of the 6th Class of Captain Dull's Company of Militia, 1st Battalion, Philadelphia Co. under the command of Col. Daniel Heister in 1778. He began signing the Skippack Alms book in 1781 even while being listed as a member of the Philadelphia Militia that same year. He signed the Alms Book 33 times, until 1832
If a Mennonite was enlisted there were two ways nonviolence provision, after the war to make a confession to the congregation and be reinstated or they were excused if they not yet have been baptized, therefore not yet held accountable to Mennonite doctrine (Wenger, 64). Mennonites were baptized as adults. The minority of Mennonites who did serve in the American Revolution joined other denominations after. The way back to the Old was not easy. To be reinstated the offender would have to publicly repent the war before the congregation and then submit to their vote.
A much later example occurs in the nonresistant dilemma of the two sons of Henry Mack, step brothers of Anna Mack Reiff and nephews of Bishop Andrew Mack, that is, Harvey and Philip. Harvey went to France in 1918 as a conscientious objector and stayed to work for the Red Cross and the American Friends Service Committee (Wenger, 75). Philip went to Officer's Candidate School at Fort Meade and became a 2nd Lieutenant with every intention of going to France as a combatant, but the war ended.
Wenger says that Philip G. Mack "accepted noncombatant service at Camp Meade; was again received into the fellowship of the church after the war, but later united with the General Conference Mennonites" (70). But Philip didn’t “accept” service, he sought it out and he wanted to fight. But he was only a noncombatant because he didn't get to France in time. Philip's mother, Sarah Ann Geisinger of a long Old Mennonite tradition of noncombatants, wouldn’t let Philip in the house with his uniform on. His nephew, JH Reiff, who lived across the street from him then, remembered that when Philip came home in his uniform his mother wouldn't let him in the house or let him stay there. As his niece Elizabeth Reiff put it, "Philip got thrown out of the communion for going to OCS instead of registering as a CO." Philip went with the “New” Mennonites to the Presbyterians after his marriage.
It is accurate to say that for his mother's sake Philip confessed and repented to the church and was received in that fellowship again, after which he lived at home until he married in 1925. Thus Wenger says that Philip was again received into the fellowship of the church after the war, but later united with the General Conference Mennonites" (70). He however, shortly thereafter, followed the way of his sister Anna into the New Mennonites and from there, with wife Catherine became Presbyterian.
If there is a divergence of theory and practice. It is possible to suppose that the military connection was watered down, whether in the life of George C. Reiff or Philip Mack. George C. and Maria Reiff are buried in the Lower Skippack Mennonite cemetery. While Mennonites would bury strangers for the sake of charity or geography, for the most part they buried their own in their graveyards. Most of George C.'s children are explicitly denominated as Mennonites in the immediate area.
Schwenks/Bauers
More needs be said of the Schwenk family of George Clemens Reiff’s wife. In 1779 Abraham Schwenk lived in Claytonville, subsequent home of Henry Mack and Jacob L. Reiff a hundred years later. He subsequently bought a large farm in Frederick Township at Delphi called Zieglerville Station, where he built a tannery and farmed till about 1808. Subsequent to that he owned 176 acres in Skippack Township along the Perkiomen Creek opposite Schwenksville. The Schwenks were members of Keeley's Lutheran Church, to which Abraham Schwenk gave the ground on which the Lutheran Church was erected in Schwenksville. His estate was divided equally among nine children. In the will his daughter who married George Reiff is sometimes named Maria, sometimes Mary. Intermixing Mennonites and Lutherans as in Maria Schwenk’s family occurred also with Andrew and Henry Mack’s brother Peter, who was a Lutheran minister in Hummelstown in the 1880’s and married the daughter of the Lutheran patriarch Emanuel Rambo.
Maria Schwenk’s mother, Veronica Landis Bauer (4/10/1756 – 9/13/1840), was a Mennonite whose father, Michael Bauer (c. 1720-1784) married Veronica Landis about 1744-45. This Michael Bauer was just sitting down to a wedding banquet in 1776, celebrating his oldest daughter’s marriage to Christian Meyer, when soldiers of the Continental Army plundered the feast and carried off a wagonload of spoils to their camp (Ruth, ‘Twas Seeding Time, 91).
Michael Bauer was in turn the son of Hans Bauer (d. 1748), who owned land on the Perkiomen in 1734. In 1742 he bought 105 acres in Butter Valley in Colebrookdale and in 1743, 134 acres in Douglas Manor (also later the residence of Henry Mack). Both these properties were annexed into Hereford Township in 1753. (Strassburger, 316f). Strassburger says that Hans was "no doubt" buried in the Hereford Mennonite Cemetery, but the tombstone has been effaced so he does not appear in the Hereford Burial List compiled by Henry Mack in 1934. This Hans Bauer (d. 1748), a Mennonite, is said to have emigrated between 1708 and 1717 before settling in Colebrookdale (Strassburger, 315). Veronica Landis' mother was the daughter of another prominent Mennonite settler, Johannes Landis, of Bucks County (Strassburger, 320).
Butter Valley was a very fertile area containing Hereford and Colebrookdale, both Mennonite communities. The first Hereford meetinghouse was built about 1743 and is the location of the oft-mentioned Hereford burial ground. In 1749 Michael Bauer inherited lands in Colebrookdale from his father. He signed the petition of 1753 to the Philadelphia Court to erect the new Hereford Township and was among the Hereford residents taxed in 1758. Michael and his wife Veronica Landis are probably also buried in the Hereford ground. Their son Samuel (1746-1822) is. There were only three children, Samuel, Fronica and Anna. Veronica married Abraham M. Schwenk in 1779.
Like Abraham S. Reiff and John B. Bechtel in the Oberholtzer Division, the Bauer and Landis trails cross very profoundly with another tributary of the Reiffs, the Bechtels and the Macks in the Mennonite church of Hereford.
Elizabeth Clemens herself is mentioned in a note in the famous diary which had belonged to her great grandfather, to which her grandfather Jacob made some later additional notes. Jacob states that “Elizabeth was married in 1763. She was then twenty years of age.” (Strassburger, 473) She had some nine sisters and five brothers. Jacob Clemens ended his years living with son John, but he had several sons. He called Gerhard the oldest but born before him were Michael, 1729, Jacob 1739, twins Gerhard and Christian 1741. There were at least some five other sons and nine daughters (471). Garret’s parents sold him two parcels of land in 1768 totaling 135 acres. Here he is called Garret Clements, Jr. after his grandfather.
George Landis Reiff (4/7/1740 – 1/24/1808)
. Along with his father and brother, he too is recorded as a private in Captain Barnet Haines Company for Lower Skippack in the Revolutionary War, but the same provisos for Mennonites at war may apply to him as to his son in the War of 1812. Both he and his wife, Elizabeth Hendricks are buried at Lower Skippack Mennonite Cemetery. Hendricks of course is an illustrious name in Pennsylvania, forever dignified by the signing of the protest against slavery by Gerhard Hendricks in 1688.
Elizabeth Hendricks (4/9/1740 – 6/25/1817) was the daughter of Leonard Hendricks (b. Krefeld, 1698-1776, buried Towamencin Mennonite Cemetery) and Elizabeth Turner (born c. 1712 in Pennsylvania). Leonard also had named son-in-law George Reiff as coexecutor of his will, probated 3/8/1776.
If it had not begun sooner with Jacob the Elder’s wife, Anna Landis, evidenced by her signing of the Skippack Alms Book, the Mennonite affiliation is thought certain with George’s marriage to Elizabeth. Genealogist and historian Harry Reiff says:
Leonard’s father, Lawrence Hendricks (b. ca. 1670 Kriegsheim Germany, d. 1749 at Towamencin, Montgomery Co.), was a Quaker and then a Mennonite. He arrived in PA with his father Willem Hendricks (1649-1691) on the "Francis and Dorothy" on 12 October 1685. Lawrence’s father, William, was a Holland Dutch Mennonite who had voyaged with Pastorius in 1682 and brought his sons Lawrence and Henry with him.
Lawrence Hendricks signed the 1728 petition for the Susquehanna Road or Line" Of this list Alderfer says "the list of signatures attached to the 1728 petition contains about twelve Mennonite names. The first six signatures are of men from the Towamencin Mennonite community. The first four (Jacob Godshalk, Godshalk Godshalk, Henry Hendricks, and Lawrence Hendricks) were the original 1714 settlers in what would later become the Towamencin Mennonite community…the Hendricks brothers may have been brothers-in-law to Godshalk Godshalk, oldest son of Jacob Godshalk, the first Mennonite bishop in America, who settled first at Germantown.”
(Alderfer, 19-21).
Jacob Reiff the Elder (11/15/1698 – 2/16/1782)
Glenn H. Landis has discovered an estate settlement in 1750 for the estate of Jacob Landes who had a son, Jacob (c. 1711 – c. 1793), but also two daughters, named in the settlement as Anna Reiff and Margreth Smith. This, it is thought, is the Anna who married Jacob Reiff the Elder. Anna Landis’ father, Jacob (c. 1685 –1749), another Mennonite émigré of about 1726, bought land from Derick Johnson in Germantown in 1727, bought further land in Franconia, Montgomery Co. in 1734, and sold both plots to his son Jacob in 1748.
Harry Reiff puts the argument like this: "She (Jacob Reiff the Elder’s mother) died after her son Jacob (with whom she lived for the last years of her life) had changed from the German Reformed Church to the Skippack Mennonite meetinghouse, possibly because Jacob may have married Mennonite Anna Landis. I believe I told you of the Anna Landis theory that Jacob married the daughter of Skippack Mennonite Jacob Landis. Also Jacob had become disillusioned of the German Reformed congregations…and he may have changed religions in disgust" (Harry Reiff, Letter of 3/1/2003).
Jacob the Elder had two sons, Jacob Jr. and George III. It is hard to conclusively prove whether he was a Mennonite later in life because of the records which Mennonites essentially did not believe in keeping, but a summary of some of the argument goes like this:
The oldest son, Jacob Reiff Jr., the first elected member of the Pennsylvania General Assembly from Montgomery County (1786-89), who voted for the Pennsylvania convention to adopt the Constitution of the United States, seems to have followed his father's early Reformed tendencies, since he participated in the founding of the Wentz Reformed Church. His brother George, as we have seen, married a Mennonite.
Jacob Jr.'s children however got him into the Mennonites in a big way,
especially his son John Reiff (12/5/1759 – 2/6/1826) who married a daughter of Bishop Christian Funk and became a minister with that prescient, if defrocked divine, who endorsed the American Revolution. This John Reiff signed the preface, with other ministers, of the English version of Funk’s Mirror for all Mankind (Norristown, Pa.,1814). In 1814 Jacob Reiff (Jr.) donated land for the first Funkite meetinghouse in Skippack (Wenger, 350), the same land that his son John later retitled to the Dunkards after the Funkite demise.
So much more can be said of Jacob the Elder’s activities in every way that they must be given a separate article unto themselves.
Hans George Reiff
Anna Landis (1662-1753) Hans George Reiff’s arrival in Pennsylvania and Skippack is so early that his name is used as a benchmark to identify the boundaries of Michael Ziegler’s first land purchase in 1717, “beginning at a reputed Corner of Hans George Reiff’s land,” (Straussberger, 419). It seems evident from this first, that Reiff had been there long enough to identify Ziegler who came to Germantown in 1709 (Alderfer, Several Documents, 28) and second, that Reiff lived in close intellectual as well as physical proximity to these Mennonites. Ziegler, an early Mennonite minister, is designated as a trustee on the first deed of the Skippack Mennonite congregation (Alderfer, 28) that conveyed the 100 acres in 1717 for the Mennonite school house and burial ground.(Straussberger 415). He probably was the cause of Reiff being asked to witness the further trust agreement of that behest in 1725.
When Ziegler in 1734 applied to the Land Office for a resurvey of this tract of 100 acres new lines of demarcation were given, implying not only that Reiff was deceased, which he was, but also that he had originally been the only point of reference available for the deed, thus a very early landholder indeed. Instead of saying “beginning at a corner of Hans George Reiff’s land,” the resurvey says, “beginning at a post at a corner of Henry Penibaker’s land and extending…to a post thence North East by the land of Jacob Colph (421). The resurvey gives the original survey date as December, 1717. “In pursuance of a warrant …dated the tenth day of September in the year 1717…there was survey’d and set out unto Michael Ziegler…in December, 1717 a certain tract…beginning at a post at a corner of Henry Penibaker’s land and extending thence…to a post…by the land of Jacob Colph.” (Strassburger, 423)
Much more can and will be said of Hans George Reiff and his son Jacob.
All individuation stands in opposition to the Apple sauce or pablum, of the mass, which I'm saying is not good. That it is not good at all to be one is the point but it is good for all to be different. The analogy holds to the whole length and breadth of humanity now facing extraordinary rendition to make it unhuman, which disclosures might be referred to below. But for now, what should we do? We should fight to the death to retain our past. We should fight to the death against the rule of the gods. Do you not believe the old tales that you would ascend with the gods, all 300,000 of you, those gods being renditions of Egyptian reliefs of the least Stitchin tales that the Annunaki invented and enslaved men to mine gold for them, and now, lo the eons, after return to possess the earth because they have a title deed from their rape of the womb? The new order will make the Spanish Inquisition small and Goya a comedian. To get what the Mt. Shasta orbs want to bring to pass you must breed Goya, Hieronymus Bosch and Bruegel. More, you think that the orbs and inferior minds of Eisenhower and Goode will prepare the way, and not John of Patmos and Isaiah, Ezekiel and David, El Greco. That is how the man is enslaved. Fight the gods.
so sought by the lost of Mt. Shasta.
For me, the claim about to be made that the human is not human but mutation of design by alien astronauts, space alien progenitors is fraud. I don't call it fraud so much on the basis of its empiricism, which hardly exists, but on the basis of its proponents in whose ilk I have seen for no reasoned purpose for decades, gurus for a day like Guru Maharaj Ji at the Astrodome in the early 70's to Richard who formed the community of Stelle in Illinois, with whom I had a conversation once, who would receive aid and comfort from Corey Goode who says some 300,000 will "ascend," or the buffalo soldier ceremony in the dugout of the hogan at Morning Star commune. I knew Raja Rao after a fashion and G. V. Desani second hand, but mediums, psychics, channelers, readers etc., Robert Williams, San Karshan-Steve Bridge with various exposures to the secret groups, aikido, explaining cathar lines, albium bodies, and why Andromeda and the Milky Way separated, in case you wondered, eventually we're all going to join in and and become one with the unified field are no extra terrestrial intlligence, Tibetan meditation, on and on. I have not seen one with whom I felt empathy and none of them thought I was any more than a peasant, which my aunt had already proven by my professional wheels.
The peasant resists his indoctrination when farmers and traders already participate in the divine nature. When told that the world was made by aliens and his mind is controlled like Corey Goode's the peasant is not apt to give up his selfhood. Skepticism used to be called a scientific attitude before scientists uncovered themselves with yage, like poets or offered their wives to the stars. I had already given my selfhood to the Maker of Heaven and Earth and I bear His Name. Just this morning I was singing, not entirely in English, the Name of the Lord is a strong tower, the righteous run into it and they are safe. "When the new Vatican goes cosmic with this [star] religion and Jesuit astronomers await their "evangelist" from space, there will be astigmatic baptisms. Then comes the Trick or Treat. Take the overlord of Childhood's End who invades earth in silver ships. After 50 years the alien overlord jumps out of Dante dressed in leather wings, horns and barbed tail! Earthlings believe their true benefactors the devil and his angels. Fly that off the abyss. In the black waking of Collective Mind, Atmam-Brahman All is One, the space savior will reveal that science, archaeology and technology were alien signs and wonders. All people who believe in science will believe" (from Multidimensional Upset to appear at Unlikely Stories).
Models of the past for this present era of disclosure show the loss 1) of their language and 2) of their religion 3) along with the genius of their art came with the loss of religion when the German Reformed ended in the United Church with such homogenized beliefs as to fit the middle class absorption into the greater whole. This absorption is really absorb or die, witness the Abenaki as one case. What the English did to both the PA Dutch and the Algonquin should not diminish that they did in the whole India subcontinent for a hundred years. What can we learn from the demise of these peoples? That to adopt the disclosures will paralyze human society and then kill it. Is this point of view going to be allowed? Hardly. That is, never, it will be eradicated as efficiently as an y virus of small pox killed the Indians. There is however one difference, what was partial in the German and Abenaki is universal in the world of disclosure, meaning it is the end of the human. Try persuading anybody of this when they say that zero point energy and instant recall and longevity to 500 years is the exchange for its adoption. The only rejoinder is that the most historically repressive Jesuits allied with the deep state and the corporations has a vaccine for ya and Warren Buffet wants to take you to lunch. Alien space savior technology to the stars. Hot dog. Saturn. But it's useful to remember that the Pentagon developed a vaccine by 2011 that could modify behavior, pacify behavior that was deemed excessive, delivered either in flu vaccines or airborne spray. It was to be used to tame the Afgans, but it will work wonders with all opponents of disclosure med science and religion-believed outeers. Outeers sums up all the SSP entities said to appear in their 9 dimensions. That the peasant participating in the divine creation is of the 10th dimension will be denied by these diehard bastards. The peasant can easily answer back, you do not recognize me? Well I do not recognize you. For that he will be shunned by all the media of control, which of itself tells us who is who and what is what.
Acknowledgments
The modern work on many of the names included here stems from the geneology of Harry E. Reiff, Reiff Families in America, 1986. Reiff to Riffe (1995) by Fred J. Riffe pays tribute to him as does Emigrants, Refugees and Prisoners, (1997) Vol II by Richard Warren Davis. His influence extends beyond his printed works. He has long contributed to genealogy forums and has willingly corresponded at length with interested parties. He is the source for the first modern printed reference by Davis that Hans George Reiff “was in Pennsylvania by 14 Feb 1718 as he owned land next to Michael Ziegler at Bebber Twp., (later Salford twp.) according to the deed bearing that date from David Powell to Michael Ziegler.” Davis indicates his debt in a footnote as a “letter from Harry E. Reiff of Ambler, Pennsylvania, September 1994. He has generously corresponded on many subjects of the background and foreground of this present effort and has seen these manuscripts which pass here as biography, although none of the errors likely to be found are his doing, quite to the contrary, he has saved this narrative from error a number of times with his meticulous attention to detail and reasoned judgments.
Acknowledgments are due to my brother Robert A. Reiff who accompanied me in these searches of war records, ship lists and newspaper accounts in the beginning of this effort in 1974
12. -Annabellah Elspeth (Bullins) Reiff (2012-).
Theodore Kristopher Aeyrie (Bullins) Reiff (2015-)
Nikolai Agassi (Bullins) Reiff (2018-)
-Jameson Alan Edwin (Melton) Reiff (2020-)
11. Aeyrie Edwin Arthur (Carlson) Reiff (1985).
Andrew Edwin Arthur (Carlson)
Reiff (1989-
10. Andrew Edwin (Yeo) Reiff (1941-
9. Jacob Howard (Mack) Reiff (1908-1994) Buried Laurel Hill Cemetery,
Bala-Cynwyd.
8. Howard Rosenberger Reiff (1880-1927) Buried Northwood Cemetery, Broad St.
7. Jacob Landis Reiff (1857-1929) Buried Methacton Cemetery.
6. Abraham Schwenk Reiff (1817-1879) Buried Methacton Cemetery.
5. George Clemens Reiff (1793-1860) Buried Lower Skippack Mennonite
Meetinghouse
4. George Hendricks Reiff (1768-1847) Buried Lower Skippack Mennonite Church
3. George Landis Reiff (1740-1808)
2. Jacob Reiff the Elder (1698-1782) Buried Lower Skippack Mennonite Cemetery
1. Hans George Reiff (c. 1659-1726) Buried Salford Mennonite Cemetery.
.
In reverse order the roster is:
Joel Alderfer, "Several Documents Relating to Early Franconia Conference Mennonites." In Mennonite Historians of Eastern Pennsylvania, Newsletter Supplement, July, 1984.
Richard Warren Davis. Emigrants, Refugees and Prisoners. Vol. II. 1997.
Douglas L. Good. The Growth of a Congregation: A History of the Hereford Mennonite Church New Order. Bally, PA. 1988.
Christian Funk. Mirror for all Mankind. Norristown, PA,1814.
John F. Funk. The Mennonite Church and Her Accusers. Elkhart, Indiana: Mennonite Publishing Company, 1878.
The Perkiomen Region [PR] Originally published by the Historical and Natural Science Society of the Perkiomen Region, Pennsburg, PA, 1921, republished by Adams Apple Press, 1994.
Fred J. Riffe. Reiff to Riffe Family in America, 1995.
John L. Ruth. ‘Twas Seeding Time: A Mennonite View of the American Revolution. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1976.
Ralph Beaver Strassburger. The Strassburger Family and Allied Families of Pennsylvania. Gwynedd Valley, PA, 1922.
J. C. Wenger. History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference. Telford, PA. Franconia Mennonite Historical Society, 1937. Mennonite Publishing House, Scottdale, PA, 1985.
