Mother’s Day: May 10, 2020
The first Mother’s Day was celebrated in 1908. It was initiated by Anna Jarvis as a memorial to her mother in Grafton, West Virginia at St. Andrew’s Methodist Church. A campaign was started to...
Category: Family
Getting to Know the Family—Through Social Distancing
We are going through a crisis at this time that we never could have imagined just a few months ago. Our visits with our children and grandchildren living in Yardley, Pennsylvania and Freeport, Maine...
Discovery: Two Letters From Timothy Hagenbuch to His Brothers
The internet is an amazing tool for connecting people and information. The more we share on Hagenbuch.org, the easier it is for people to find and connect with their family roots. When my father...
The Final Request: Samuel Sechler and Mary Davis, Part 5
The March 13, 1880 proposal of marriage from Samuel Sechler to Mary Davis was accepted on April 8 in a letter from Mary to Sam. We do not know what occurred between that date...
The Proposal: Samuel Sechler and Mary Davis, Part 4
Although the Sechler family of Pennsylvania only impacts the genealogy of a fraction of our readers, the letters that Samuel Sechler and Mary Davis wrote to each other in 1879 and 1880 open a...
Poetry in Enoch’s Written History
In February 2020, I examined Enoch Hagenbuch’s (b. 1814) written history and celebrated the addition of his family information to Beechroots (Revisiting Enoch Hagenbuch’s Written History). Enoch writes of names and personal details, yet...
Love Letters Continued: Samuel Sechler and Mary Davis, Part 3
Samuel Sechler and Mary Davis were married on December 1, 1880. They are the parents of Hannah Margaret Sechler who married Clarence Charles Hagenbuch—great great great grandson of the patriarch Andreas and grandfather of...
A Winter’s Day in Hagenbuch Country
On a cold January day, my father, Mark Hagenbuch, and I ventured into Hagenbuch country—Albany Township, Berks County, Pennsylvania. We had three important stops planned for the day, all of significance to our family....
Painting Portraits of Our Family, Part 2
The primary career of women, like Andreas’ wives, in colonial America was housewife or Hausfrau (that is, running the household) and raising the children. However, Andreas’ daughters and possibly a granddaughter were also likely...
Revisiting Enoch Hagenbuch’s Written History
In the summer of 2015, this site published a series of four articles about Enoch Hagenbuch (b. 1814) and his written history (Enoch Hagenbuch: Early Family Historian, Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4). Enoch...
