Acknowledgments: These are the last hard copies of ourselves before the digital. The question, like with all those old albums of photographs, old and new is, what to do with them after we have put them on drop box. Do we throw away the letters as superfluous? What about the civil war photographs? Who will store them when we are gone, the linens, the pots, the books? When we go into the world of light will they be left here standing all alone? To answer, we here attempt to be faithful to the hard copy, keep it, guard it, preserve the black and white fades in air tights, label each, tell their stories, revere the past!
The single most discovery in this immediate research was in 2012 when I stopped in at the Mennonite Heritage Center with the idea of photographing the large Bible printed at Ephrata. This community established in 1732 by Johann Conrad Beissel in Lancaster County translated and printed the largest book printed in colonial America, the 1500 page Martyrs Mirror of the Mennonites, which concerns Ch. I below. Along the way I asked to see the Skippack alms book, the oldest of its sort, begun about 1738. Beginning at the end and paging forward (it wasn't the original, but a facsimile made for such inquiries), on the fist page. I read that in 1739 "Anna Reiffen" gave 10 pounds for the building of a new Mennonite Meeting house (deduced later).
How that signature came about in that book involves the cross and parallel roads by wagon and horseback over that intense section of the south east corner of PA, broadly called Philadelphia. First it involves the Mennonites. Anna herself was called Reformed, German reformed and a church of such believers met in her house and her son's house, Jacob, after here husband had passed in 1727. Called the Reiff church is involved that son Jacob in wide ranging affairs. So even if in the end Anna was buried by a Lutheran pastor in a Mennonite burial ground in 1753. So it also involves Reformed. But her daughter and another son, Conrad, were involved by their marriages in the New Born. So it involves the New Born, In anothere generation the mennonite marriages of these children and grandchildren soon consume all these families for the next foreseeable generations as Mennonite. Taking this family as an epicenter of thers forces, swirling around them are still more sects, religions, cults, social movements, printing presses, intellectual ferment together enabled by the peculiar of Penn's Colony and its Quaker permissiveness of speech and thought, Mennonite, Reformed, Baptist, Schenwkfelder, Moravian. The list goes on. Philadelphia produced a list of 20 or thirty different religions and cults from the tame to the bizarre. So antiquaries look at religion to trace the comings and goings of the ancestors. Sometimes they leave heir belongings there for later generations to find. Names carved into old beams for example, or in Alms books We also want to know of their education and their means of livelihood, their children and grandchildren. It is truly a onus if somehow information survives in somebody’s letter a or diary. His is supercharged if there is a court brief or govt appt or sentence and if they have been embroiled in controversy we can take it to the bank. All these surround the tale of Anna Reiffen, the long aged spouse of Hans George Reiff who came to PA we know not when, but we do where, because there is a deed of 1717 where the boundary of another settler, who became the Mennonite pastor, Michael Ziegler, is drawn by reference to that of this Reiff. Reiffen by the way is just the way of saying that Anna Reiffen is married, meaning the wife of Hans George. Clearly they occupied that place before 1717, but we don’t need to know when to appreciate what we do know. Hans George was a blacksmith with a property of acres called the Pennypacker tract 20 miles from Germantown where most of these Palatinates entered the country. When it was getting too crowded so they moved to the country. The Reiffs have 4 sons and daughter in their quiver who will enter our deliveries like Fedex or Amazon packages left at our door. Some of these as we will see, or all of them if you will, managed to leave a trail.
Anna lived so long her life itself is a record of 90 years gathered
around her and because by then her grown family was well known, and her four
sons and daughter were somtimes dramatically prominent in community affairs. Her youngest son Jacob, called the
Elder, an informal title, held gathering to celebrate her life that winter.
It was the largest celebration anybody could remember and drew to itself
the countryside for free food, drink and talk. Two contemporary references are made, if one is anonymous. The journal notes by
the presiding pastor Henry Muhlenberg made after his funeral oration give much detail of her life. He was a Lutheran himself, but the service was held in the Mennonite church, where shewas anyway to be buried. A second reference occured 3 years later in a memoir by Muhlenberger's organist, Henrich Gottlieb, published after he returned to Germany.
Let us now render these accounts with some discussion that will involve Anna, her children and the society and religion of which she was a part. To proceed chronologically in this, but going forward and then back, scuttling first to account Anna;s funeral in two sources. If you find this tedious the complications of their lives are so much more involved and known than our own. That’s a joke of course, but we don’t have to hang our laundry from the rooftops. We do every thing we can to cover our peccadilloes up. So in an order of going you can dispute with me the peccadilloes of Anna’s daughter, also named Anna, who married her husband Conrad Gehr and was embroiled in the last stages of one of the most virulent beliefs of the time, the New Born, or Neubergornan in which Gehr was involved, which doubly affected Anna because she lived with this daughter after being widowed in 1727, but also because her own son, Conrad, gone off to Oley to join that same .affair. I don’t want to go too deep into it here, for it is set out in Ch. 2 below, but since it involves two of Anna’s family it is also illustrative of the lawless climate of the whole milieu. Historians love their milieus.
Religion was a large factor among those palatinate folk who ordered their lives by beliefs hardly know of today, These will enter in to our further discussion as we climb the limbs of this tree. Among those who speculate about origins of families, they first want to know when they came to PA, then maybe as important what they were,
Pastor M refers to these two Conrads in his notes to the effect:
First gehr,
then reiff. Mentioned in the funeral obsequies,
then funeral itself in Mittelberger,
then after we lay Anna to rest, back to her husband Hans George, his standing in the community,
and then his son the Elder, his religion [everybody wants to draw him in witness…)polemics, court cases, contraversaries antagonist with Boehm and the colony of 1727, trips to Europe, appointments, repute, as notable and more than his brother Conrad’s, and even more. Whose grave is this, this one and this, ask me I tell them.
II. his sons jacob and…marrying mennonites
