A Visit to George Washington's Army

Loretto was a small place.

Michael and Catherine’s son John Gibbons married Maria Anna Magdalen Conrad (1839) the daughter of John Conrad III and Mary Ellen Schmal. Yes, we’re back to the Conrads; John G. married his mother’s step-granddaughter.

Mary Ellen Schmal-Small had an interesting background: Her father Johannes Schmal, certainly sounds like a German immigrant. Her mother (brace yourself) was named Mary Margaret Storm and her father was the potter Joseph Storm, the brother of Maria Storm who married Jacob Adams of the Shropshire family.

Mercifully, Joseph Storm had the good sense to marry a non-relative, Margret Eck. Her father Johannes “Hannes” Eck was born in Switzerland in 1720, and immigrated with his father Jacob Eck, an Alsatian gunsmith, to establish a homestead on a heavily-wooded site west of Tylersport, PA. Once there, he constructed a stone barn that stood until the 1960’s.

Hannes, now officially known as John, in 1767 was appointed constable of Salford Township (in southeast Pennsylvania) by the Court of Quarter Sessions in Philadelphia. He objected strenuously to this time-consuming honor, but grudgingly fulfilled the duties of the office.

The Landis Homestead, built in Salford Township and dating to 1839.
Source: Wikipedia

Hannes/John was likely picked for appointment because he was a fairly prosperous man; when he died (1809) his estate was worth 1,601 pounds, 19 shillings and 8 pence ($8,000.00).

One of Margaret Eck’s sisters recalled the abundance of their childhood: woods alive with a plentitude of deer. Grapes, red plums, hazelnuts, shellbarks, huckleberries and crab apples all growing wild. Hannes raised hemp and flax for making cloth. Rye was grown for bread, as in Europe, and beans were ground into it to increase the yield. Sickles were used to harvest rye, corn and buckwheat, and the womenfolk helped with this and all the other farm chores.

At one point in the Revolutionary War, Hannes learned that George Washington and his army were encamped by the Skippack River, about seven miles from the farm. So he loaded some of his children into a wagon and they went to see the novel sight.

We know all this because sometime in the 1850’s the Eck sister, now an old woman, started reminiscing about the Good Old Days. Her granddaughter grabbed pen and paper and scribbled it all down. I recall a similar experience with my Beers grandparents, who were  puzzled as to why a young person would be interested in the past.

By the way, the Eck family was known in Switzerland and Alsace as Egg, only it was pronounced “Eck”; when they arrived in the colonies they changed the spelling to Eck.

So boggle your brains trying to figure the precise degree of consanguinity here. And just imagine what the appallingly inbred British royal family’s genealogists go through.