Sheffler Administrative Stuff!!

Hi there!  This blog has lain dormant for quite a while, and it was brought to my attention that some links have died or been maimed in the interim.

I jumped into action today to make sure that the email address at bottom right, don [at] sheffler [dot] org, is actually functional.  And it is now functional.

Don't know about the mailing list through bloglet yet, don't know about the RSS feed buttons either.  Checking on all those as we go.

For those of you who landed here today, I am Don Sheffler, a descendant of George Sheffler (b. about 1779) through his son Frederick born 1808 if I'm remembering correctly.

Back when I quite severely cut back my family research efforts a decade ago, my 6th cousin once removed, Ed Sheffler, had a blog about his Sheffler line through George Sheffler's oldest son Johannes born 1801, again if I am remembering correctly.  This is Ed's,

Life moves us around a bit and I've had about 10 years of other more urgent activities to attend to, raising up the kids, changing careers around, etc.  So although I have an almost alarmingly robust chest of files and such, documenting my somewhat intense five years of research 2000-2005, I have not waded through it daily and nightly as I used to do.

I am glad to look things up, though!  The email is now valid again.

Feel free to look through the individual family line blogs starting with George Sheffler.  Although the blogs only go another couple generations below George, I do have, as I said, an almost alarmingly robust chest of files for most of the lines.

I'll try to get back here more often!

Read Full Article HERE...

Sheffler Family History Blog is Now Open

Well, it has been open for more than half a decade.

However, as you can see below there hasn't been an update posted here in roughly 4 years. Back then our main web site was static and this blog was merely a link. We did a lot of our communicating through the "Contact Us" page and email. We urged people to join the Sheffler mailing lists and forums (fora?) at Rootsweb.

Things change...

This blog here is being re-tooled as the main page for Sheffler Family History and Genealogy. All the content that was on our sheffler.org static pages will migrate here.
You can always post comments here. You can email me, Don, at our original address:

Don (at) Sheffler (dot) org

Just put a real "@" sign in place of the (at) and put a real "." where it says (dot).


If at any point in the future that email address is troublesome, I will always have:

ShefflerDotOrg (at) gmail (dot) com

Just put a real "@" sign in place of the (at) and put a real "." where it says (dot).

Yes, this will be on the final exam.

Read Full Article HERE...

The Little Old Cemeteries

Out here in California there is an old cemetery near me that began receiving the remains of early Southern Californians in about 1880. It is fairly large, though, and is run by a local cemetery association.

In Pennsylvania, though, cemeteries belonging to churches of the earliest settlers, or private plots on land sold many times over since the first families buried their loved ones there, just crumble away below brush and rock, alongside county roads or behind the ruins of farmhouses and cabins found there.

This story of such a cemetery is appeared a few months ago and caught my attention because, ironically, I made note that it wasn't going to get the attention of too many other people:

The stones are marked with names like Beamer and Remaley, some of the oldest families in Murrysville, known then as Franklin Township. Revolutionary War and Civil War veterans are buried there.

The records from Olive Reformed Church -- disbanded around 1960 and demolished more than 10 years ago -- document generations of baptisms and marriages, as well as deaths from such period ailments as apoplexy, typhoid fever and whooping cough.

Olive is just one of many such abandoned cemeteries in Westmoreland County and around the region....

Ostronic inherited the job from her mother, who was the last person to be buried there, in 2000. Caretaker by default, she was given a map, a briefcase full of old papers and a bank account with $50 in it, said Pete Geiger of Murrysville, a member of the Murrysville-Export Rotary Club whose mother was a Remaley. Once a year, Rotarians pitch in to give the abandoned cemetery "a good working over" for Memorial Day, Geiger said.

"A church builds a cemetery, then it goes out of operation," he said. "The corporation stays on the books, but everybody dies. So there's a cemetery with nobody responsible for it."

According to Scott Doyle, a historic preservation specialist with the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, the public's interest in preserving historic cemeteries is high right now.

"You're the fourth call I've received today," said Doyle. "It's a pretty active group of people, and there's a big concern about historic cemeteries in the commonwealth. As for those that assume care for these abandoned cemeteries by choice or by default, we can provide guidance on what appropriate measures are to document or restore them."

Every year, Ostronic writes letters to the small and dwindling number of relatives of the deceased, asking them for donations. She hires a local man to mow the grass, but tries to stretch out the meager funds by having him mow only before the "big holidays," like Mother's and Father's days.

"I don't know who to give it over to, pass it on to," said Ostronic. "It's not like there's money to say, here, take care of this -- there is not. I do worry about the future of this little cemetery."

Read Full Article HERE...

Pennsylvania Census and County Formation Maps

I'm not from Pennsylvania.

I've never been to Pennsylvania.

Imagine how puzzled I look when I see that somebody was born in maybe Northampton County, then moved to Bedford County before part of it became Westmoreland County... and I have no idea when any of this happened.

This helps:
An animated map of the formation of the counties of Pennsylvania.
CLICK HERE

Click on "Play" to watch PA grow, or click on any of the listed years to see how the state looked at any given time.

Read Full Article HERE...

Remembering ...

This Memorial Day, just wanted to mention a few of the family that died in war time.

Daniel K Sheffler and Henry Foster Sheffler were sons of Samuel C. Sheffler, and both served in the Civil War along with their brother Israel Truxal Sheffler.

Henry served in Company A, 76th Ohio Infantry, and was killed around 1864.

Daniel K. Sheffler was married and he enlisted when his daughter was just 2 months old. He joined Company I, 11th PA Infantry and served with two cousins, Uriah Sheffler son of John Sheffler, and Noah Sheffler son of Frederick Sheffler. Three months later he was wounded in the Battle of the Wilderness and taken prisoner, May 4, 1864. As a POW he died on June 1, 1864. His daughter Elizabeth married Samuel Hunter Jamison and they have living descendants today.

My father's Uncle Warren Sheffler was in the Army Air Force during WWII. In December 1944, Warren was on a crash boat stationed on Lake Hensley in Texas during an air show paratroop exhibition. Several of the parachutists were blown off course into the lake, and all but one was quickly recovered. Warren dove into the water to assist the struggling trooper but both were drowned. He was 34 at the time. Below is a photo of my great-grandfather Henry receiving the Soldier's Medal for his son.



Warren's younger brother Robert "Bud" Sheffler also served in WWII in the United States Navy. He and his wife Evie currently live in Illinois. In just a few minutes we're going to give them a call and wish them well today.

Read Full Article HERE...

New Posts????

Yes, they're a coming.

It's been a busy couple of months but now things are stabilized to the point where posts will appear here quite regularly.

Also, when I am able to upload a somewhat complete Sheffler gedcom at Rootsweb I'll announce it here with a link.

UPDATE 6/30/05: Yeah, right. Don't you love people promising the moon and delivering Swiss Cheese? While I suspect that our cheese is Palatinate Cheese and not Swiss, it's all just a sandwich ingredient anyway, not the Lunar Orb. Sorry.

Instead of promising that regular posts will start this week, I'll just let you know that this is my intention. Believe me if you're so inclined. :-)

Read Full Article HERE...

What the Heck are all the "Subscriptions" About??

Notice on the right hand side now you can "subscribe" to this blog site in a number of ways.

You can enter your email address and each time there is a new post here, like this one, it will be sent to you via email, with a link back to here.

Or if you have a My Yahoo personalized page or a My MSN page, you can add this site as live content, right where you have your News and Sports and Movies, etc.

The heading from the last few articles will be displayed in a "Digging Up The Shefflers" box just like the other content sources on your page. SIMPLE! Just click on the appropriate button for either.

And finally, for those of you savvy enough at this point to have RSS or Atom enabled Agregators, you can get my feed URL with that XML button.

There's a flavor for every customer here.

The important thing is that you can now stay up to date, without too much hassle.

Have new articles pop up where you would like to see them so you don't have to hunt down this site every day. Or week. Or... ?

Just doing my duty!

Read Full Article HERE...