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.

Valley of the Pines

Jacob (1761), the son of Thomas and Magdalena Adams, caught the eye of Maria, the daughter of John and Mary Elizabeth Storm. They married in the chapel at Conewago, PA. Perhaps inspired by his father’s copious grain crops, Jacob became a distiller.  His parents must have given Jacob a firm moral grounding; in later life he disinherited a son for failing “to fulfill an obligation”.

Together Jacob and Maria raised 11 children.

Their daughter Maria (born 1785) married one John Conrad, whom I always assumed was another Englishman. Boy, was I wrong. His father John Kunrat claimed direct descent from a German king and had been born in the contentious region of Alsace-Lorraine, then located in the north-east of France. Germany on its northern boarder, Switzerland to the south, with the Rhine River meandering along its eastern boundary, its rich alluvial plains boast vineyards while its up slopes are sprinkled with monasteries and castles. Its natives are neither French nor German, but something in between: Alsatian.

Mr. Kunrat immigrated to good old Frederick, Maryland, where his son John was born in 1778. The family joined in the northwestern drift to Pennsylvania and some of them are still there.

John Conrad seems to have struggled financially. He was primarily a farmer, but occasionally worked as a cabinetmaker, and even did a stint in a relative’s cobbler’s shop. His brother Baltzer was well-known in the area as a master carpenter. His family appears in obscure publications: Conewago Chapel Founding Families, Catholic Trails West (vol.II) and a little tome called Valley of the Pines by D.J. Byrne. Obviously this branch of the family had re-espoused Catholicism.

Maria died a few days after giving birth to her eleventh child, in Conewago, PA at the ripe old age of 38. So John piled his surviving family and household goods into a heavy Conestoga wagon and plodded up the Old Kittanning Indian Trail west to Loretto, PA. He mourned Maria for a few years, but had a quiver full of motherless children to worry about. In 1827, when he was 49, he married 27-year old Catherine Adelsburger. She bravely assumed responsibility for John’s 10 children (little Polly, referred to as “an invalid,” had died at the age of 12) and dutifully churned out three babies of her own in five years.

The marriage proved to be brief.  This notice appeared in a local newspaper on 5 April 1832. Died: on Friday last, John Conrad, a respectable citizen of the vicinity of Loretto, aged about 60 years. Mr. Conrad’s death was occasioned by an injury received in rolling logs a few days before.

There is a family tradition that John grew impatient waiting for his grandsons to stack the logs, and decided to do it himself. The “young whippersnappers” involved doubtlessly felt guilty for the rest of their lives.  It’s always something. Anyway, the younger children of John and Maria were now technically orphans, and there were all sorts of legal hearings about appointing guardians for them.

Now our family story gets a little, well, peculiar. Loretto was a very small frontier town, and everyone knew everyone. And our penniless, bereft Catherine certainly knew a widower with five young children named Michael Fitzgibbons, a Limerick-born immigrant who had made his way to Loretto. She married him as quickly as decency allowed (1833) and popped out her first little Fitzgibbons nine months later. This was a daughter named Eleanor Ellen after Michael’s dead first wife. Two more children followed, and one of them, John (named after her dead first husband) chose to ditch the “Fitz” and just be “Gibbons”. Having shown due respect to the Dearly Departeds, Catherine named her last child Michael after his (then living) father.

Catherine and Michael had a long life together, and when he died she erected a fine big cross over him, inscribed In Memorium [sic] of/Michael Fitzgibbons/died/Jan.25,1862/in the 77^th year of/his life. She followed him to the grave a few years later.