Ghost Stories from Childhood
My eldest son, William, is fascinated with ghosts, and not just because of Halloween. His ghoulish obsession actually began last year when he played with some old Ghostbusters toys, and grew after his great...
Category: Stories
The Grisly Demise of Henry Hagenbuch
As a warning to our readers, this article describes the unsettling details of a suicide during the 19th century. Henry Hagenbuch was born on February 23, 1812 in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania to Joseph and...
Birthday Celebrations
As Andrew wrote in last week’s article, we often get inspiration for articles from photographs. Fortunately, I started collecting photos from my Montour County, Pennsylvania family when I was very young, and over the...
Do What You Do (I Don’t Know What You Do)
When I was eleven years old, my parents purchased a video camera. Soon my sisters, cousins, friends, and I were making home movies. The films, with titles like The Detention Girl, had loose plot...
Seeing Ghosts
Ghost (noun): an apparition of a dead person which is believed to appear or become manifest to the living, typically as a nebulous image. As genealogists, my father and I see a lot of...
My Dinner With: Rebecca (Muffley) Hagenbuch
I had an interesting meal and visit with my 5th great grandfather, Andreas Hagenbuch. For my next dinner I will travel forward about 100 years to break bread with my great great grandmother, Rebecca...
One Thought Led to Another… FAMILY!
It’s not always easy to come up with an article for our genealogical site. Believe me, Andrew and I have a lot of ideas, but we also want fresh and exciting features to mix...
Digging Up a Headless Hagenbuch
Our Halloween story begins with a newspaper article published on March 28, 1879 in The Colombian. It reads as follows: INVESTIGATING THE DEAD For some days past rumors of a most extravagant nature, concerning...
Concerning Cows
How’s the Cow? It walks, it talks, it’s full of chalk. The lacteal fluid of the female member of the bovine species is highly prolific to the Nth degree. Some readers of this article...
Cousins Around the Corner
We went to my wife Linda’s 50th High School reunion at Greencastle, Pennsylvania a few weeks ago. Greencastle has a different way of scheduling their school reunions. The reunions coincide with the town’s Old...
