1931 Sheffler Reunion - Greensburg PA

For the last couple of years I've been trying to uncover the story of a forgotten Sheffler Family Reunion that took place the Summer of 1931, in Westmoreland County Pennsylvania.

I have a copy of a handwritten letter from Levi Sheffler’s neice Lizzie Sutton, who lived in Butler Pennsylvania. (The copy was emailed to me by Barb Herring - thanks Barb). The letter was written in early 1932 to Levi’s daughter Myrtle (Sheffler) Inman, in Oregon.

Lizzie mentions that in the previous summer, 1931, there was a Sheffler Family Reunion in the Greensburg area, which she and her husband and grown daughters had attended. She recounts that they met a gentleman who so resembled Levi (Myrtle's father) that she had to make note of it.

Since Levi had left the Greensburg area some 65 years earlier, just after the Civil War, no one there knew anything of his branch of the family. Lizzie told Myrtle how grateful she would be if Myrtle would send information to them in Pennsylvania so that it might be included in "the family tree" that apparently someone in Greensburg had been keeping.

As it would happen, Lizzie Sutton died the next month and there was no more correspondence about family relations with the Pennsylvania branches after that. No one in the Greensburg area today seems to know anything of a Sheffler Reunion in 1931. The Sheffler Family tree that was being kept by the organizers of the old reunion exists perhaps, somewhere, but its keepers have yet to be located.

Who would have organized and hosted this Reunion? In Greensburg in 1931 there lived a dentist named Samuel Sarver Sheffler who it is said kept records of the Sheffler history. He was roughly 40 at the time. In other related research I've heard it said that "Sam the dentist in Greensburg" was a family historian. This is probably our Samuel.

Samuel married Edna Bierer Poole Hazlett in 1922. They had at least one daughter Elizabeth J. Sheffler. I believe that this daughter Elizabeth married a Clifford Amend in 1949. If anyone knows of this family please contact me, as it appears there may possibly exist in one of their homes a treasure trove of familiy history, probably sitting in a trunk or old cabinet, perhaps between some books. Samuel also had a sister Elizabeth J., who I believe married a Stephenson, and so perhaps we can meet up with some of this line.

You never know.