CRUTTS - New York Pioneer?

With the majority of early census records in New Jersey destroyed, research of the early days there is a challenge.  Somehow in my searching for other sources, I stumbled across an article from a book called Genealogical and Family History of Central New York compiled by William Richard Cutter.  On page 102 of Volume 1 is a description of Jacob Crutts who was one of the first settlers in Dryden, NY, and how he came there around 1802 with 32 others from Oxford, New Jersey, mostly those of the Snyder family.  The book does not name the wife of this Jacob Crutts but other sources have been found that name Catharina Snyder as his wife, which easily explains why Jacob traveled with the Snyder family to relocate in NY.

So here's where I started to wonder. My theory is that anybody with the name Cruts in the Oxford area of New Jersey before 1820 came from the Grotz family in Pennsylvania, and more specifically, they would be related to the ANDREW GROTZ line. Why?  Two reasons. 

1. In mapping all the descendants of Andrew's brother Jacob Grotz, Jr., it so far appears that Jacob Jr.'s immediate descendants remained on PA side of the river prior to 1820.
2. I have deeds that show Andrew Grotz sold his land in Forks Twp, PA and Andrew Crutz Sr. (presumed to be same person) acquired land in Oxford Twp, NJ in 1793.

Theoretically we should be able to test my theory with this case of Jacob Crutts who relocated to Dryden, NY.  Let's see how we do.  First, according to the NY-Jacob's age at death (apparently given on his gravestone in NY), he was 88 in 1855, making his birth about 1766.  I have located a baptism record for a son of Andrew Grotz, Johann Jacob, born in 1766. 

Second, most of the family trees out there say this Jacob Crutts was born in Oxford, New Jersey, but I think they only know that he came from Oxford before he arrived in New York.  Unfortunately all the early census' do not tell us the birth place of those enumerated until we get to the 1850 census.  In 1850, Jacob was 84 and living with his son Jacob at the time, but that census nevertheless records the older Jacob's place of birth as PA.

Third, I located a will abstract for Christian Snyder who died in Oxford in 1797.  It lists a daughter named Maria Catharina.  One of the witnesses to the will was Andrew Grotz.

Finally the 1810 census of Dryden shows Jacob GROATZ living next to Christopher Snyder.  I realize that spelling of names on a census doesn't count for much, but the appearance of this particular spelling does support my ideas of this Jacob's origins.

So there is my case as it stands now.  I think the Jacob Crutts who was a pioneer in Dryden, New York was a son of Andrew Grotz Sr. of PA and a brother of my 4th g-grandmother Catharina.  He moved to Oxford, NJ from Forks Twp., PA around 1793 with his father, and shortly after 1800 he was moving with the Snyder family to New York. More research is called for, but I think the possibility is there!  Please contact me with any feedback or further discussion.

Sommers at St. Michael's

Another place I visited on my recent research trip was the Lutheran Archives in Germantown, PA.  I went there in hopes of finding the original church records for any of "our" Lutheran churches, specifically the "Straw" church in Philipsburg, the Oldwick church, and St. John's and Christ Evangelical in Easton.  Sadly, it did not take long to determine that the archives does not hold any original records from any of these churches.  The librarian said that the churches themselves probably still hold the records, and in fact he said that the Oldwick church had recently contacted them asking for advice about how to store their records.  So, it was disappointing.

But I did notice while looking at their bookshelf that there were books pertaining to two St. Michael's churches in Philadelphia.  I am most familiar with St. Michael's Lutheran and Zion Church where we found a treasure trove of records pertaining mostly to the Menge family and to a lesser extent to our Sommer family (both our Freistett and Hoch-Weisel families).  But there was another church called St. Michael's Evangelical Lutheran Church in Germantown.  I asked the librarian about it and he gave an excellent accounting of the two different churches, which I'm sorry to say I cannot recount in very much detail thanks to apparent memory overload.  But I did take a gander at and make copies from the book pertaining to the Germantown church.  What should I find but, among other things, the baptism record for Johannes Sommer, son of Johann Georg and Barbara Sommer, born 1759, sponsored by Jacob Brown and the mother.  How cool is that?!  We had been guessing that John Summers, Sr. might have been born in Germany or even enroute to America, but now it turns out that he was the baby of his family and born in America!  So the visit to the Lutheran Archives did meet with some success.

As a side note, this is not the first time we've seen the name of Jacob Brown. First, there was a passenger on the same ship Brothers that arrived in 1752 whose name was Jacob Braun.  And second, we located a baptism record for Johan Jurg, of Jacob Brown and wife Catharina, born 1755 in Philadelphia, sponsors Jurg and Anna Barbara Sommer.  The identity of Catharina has a couple of possibilities.  She could be the sister of Georg Sommer, born in 1726. OR she could be the sister of Anna Barbara Rub, given that another researcher located a Freistett marriage record between Jacob Braun and Catharina Rub in Freistett in 1751. Research is ongoing, but the Braun connection gives us another lead back to Germany - yeah!

A Picker in the Will of George Summers Jr.

As mentioned in the previous post, one of the themes of my recent research trip was to fill in the gaps for the children of Ernst and Maria, our original immigrants.  That has been especially hard to do for the girls, which is no surprise I guess.  Anna Mann, born in 1781, was the first of the Menge children born in New Jersey, and she was baptized at the Straw Church in Greenwich township.  She was not yet married when her father wrote his will in 1804 where he referred to her as Anny Mann (mistaken by some transcribers as Amy).  We have found later deeds that identified her spouse as James Picker or Pickering - but beyond that, we have known nothing - another lost family.

So here's the part where I want to say it's so nice to be soooo familiar with this family now that I can recognize clues when they flit across my field of observation.  Here's how it happened this time.

First I have to thank an ancestry user who posted some information on George Summers Jr., giving the exact will book reference where the will for George could be located.  So I made a note of that knowing I was going to Doylestown, the county seat of Bucks County, PA.  When I arrived and inquired at the courthouse for the will book, the kind person there told me that I would probably prefer to look at the probate packet since that had the will in it among other things.  I almost declined that offer, thinking "all I need is a copy of the will."  There was a long pause, but then I said Oh OK.  Sometimes I can be a dope.  This time I was only almost a dope.

So out come the packets, one for both George and another for his wife Ann (which I would not have seen otherwise), and the packets contained the wills, the inventories, and the accounts paid from the estates.  Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the name of James Picker in the accounts paid list.  Hmmmm.

After coming home, I was working on adding all the interesting updates to George Summers Jr. on my family tree, and I saw again that name, James Picker.  So I turned to ancestry search and typed that name with a place of PA.  Up pops James Picker living in the exact same place as George Summers - Warrington, Bucks, PA.  In fact, he lived there a long time.  And in the 1850 census when you can finally see the names of people he is living with, there is somebody who could be a wife and her name is Anna.  Hmmmmm.

And now to end the tale, the moral is to KEEP looking for records beyond the census.  It seems that ancestry is adding more and more all the time.  And what came up tonight were records from the Neshaminy Presbyterian Church in Warwick, Bucks, PA.  And there, amazingly, were baptisms for the apparent children of James and Anna Picker:  Sarah Picker, George S. (Summers?) Picker, John Picker, and Ernest Mann Picker.  Ta Da.

All I can say is that I never would have dreamed of looking in Bucks County for any member of the Mann family from Sussex, New Jersey.  But the Mann's and the Summers' were very intertwined, and to trace one on either side has often yielded clues about the other.  It's amazing.  And I learned, once again, to stay curious over being impatient when I think I just want what I came for.  If I had looked only at the will book, Anna Mann Picker's family would remain a mystery for who knows how long.  I just have to keep open, keep questioning, and keep noticing.  Sometimes these thin leads mean absolutely nothing, and sometimes they are the key. Click.

Oliver's inDeed!

I have recently returned from another trip to the east coast in search of Mann family history.  One of my goals this time around was to fill in some of the missing pieces about the children of our original immigrants, Ernst and Maria. To the best of our knowledge, their first child together was Salome, or Sarah or Sary as she would be known in her life.  She was born and baptized in Philadelphia in 1768 where her Sommer grandparents were present as witnesses.  After that, we have known almost nothing of Sarah's life until she is mentioned in her father's will, which was written in Oxford, Sussex, New Jersey in 1804.  She is mentioned there as Sary Oliver, but no marriage record for her has yet been located. In 2011, we had located an Orphan's Court record dated in 1826 where an application was made by a Daniel Oliver listing himself and three others (John, Mary (Cleaver) and Peter) as heirs-at-law of Sarah.  But still we've had no idea who Sarah's husband was.  T'was one of the ongoing mysteries.

So this trip yielded two documents which have helped tell more of this particular story.  One was a guardianship assignment made by the Orphan's Court in Sussex County in 1818 assigning Nathaniel Oliver, the father, as guardian of Daniel, John, Mary, and Peter.  Aha!  Finally we know the Oliver father.  In addition this document gives us an approximate idea that Sarah probably died shortly before the time of this document (1818).

But then one has to drive from Newton, the county seat of Sussex County to Belvidere, the county seat of Warren County, to follow the trail and there more treasures were waiting to be found.  Specifically a deed dated in 1827 from all the Oliver heirs selling their inheritance of their part of their grandfather's estate to George B. Voss.  This document not only further identifies Daniel, John, Mary, and Peter as Sarah and Nathaniel's children, but it further states that Nathaniel died before the Mann estate was divided, so some time between 1818 and 1827.

And there was one more nugget yet to be found.  In reading this deed all the way through, at the end were two proclamations from judges in PA, affirming the identities of three of the Oliver children.  Specifically, John Oliver was noted as being from Luzerne County, PA, and Mary Cleaver and Peter Oliver were noted as being from Columbia County, PA.  It's my assumption that Daniel Oliver was living somewhere in Warren County at the time because there was no special proclamation of his identity further noted.

Soooooo, what does this mean?  It means that I started looking in Luzerne and Columbia counties in PA for Oliver's and I have not been disappointed.  There are in fact some family trees out there that go from present day back to John Oliver and stop there because of not knowing his parents.  And now here I come, working from the other direction, having the parents and am just now discovering their children.  Isn't it amazing how this genealogy work comes full circle?  I must admit I love nothing more than to watch the pieces of my puzzle falling together with the pieces of somebody else's.  It sure makes every second of doing this work worthwhile.

*Wildcards* on a Whim - Blue Mountain!

The next greatest thing to indexed digital documents is the ability to search with wildcards. The results of such a search can be startling and can even lead to some doors that have been waiting and waiting to be found. You didn't find them before because you could never dream of some spelling variations in a name both in original recording and later transcriptions. But wildcards can account for some of those variables, and bring to the foreground records that have previously remained unfound in plain sight.

Take last night. Cousin J. and I were trying to fill in some holes in our tree and the suggestion of trying wildcards flew across the late night wires. Then at 1:28 a.m. comes an email from cousin J. entitled "Oh my!" and in it was a link to a document from a database we have not looked at before, namely Pennsylvania, Land Warrants and Applications, 1733-1952. Here is her transcription of the record found:

Ernst Menge of Phila. Inholder[?my question]
On a small Easterly Branch of a creek, known by the name of Bear Swamp Creek, within a mile or two of Henry Miller's saw mill and within two or three miles of the foot of Blue Mountain 300 acres
Northamton County.

The date of this document is 26 Aug 1767. We believe it is a warrant application rather than a land warrant, mostly because it does not indicate that the land was paid for. Did Ernst get the land? That's a question remaining to be answered.

But this document begs many other questions. Blue Mountain is today in Lehigh County about 25 miles northwest of Easton.  In 1767, Ernst had just been married to Maria for a year. And we know in 1769 Ernest Mann who was also a stocking weaver was taxed on 5 1/2 acres in Philadelphia. It would not be until 1776 that we find him making a tavern application in Oxford, New Jersey. So in the meantime, where did he get the means to be applying for 300 acres in the Poconos? Was it a wedding present from his father-in-law, George Sommer? Was it an inheritance from his parents in Germany? Could he really have been doing that well with the tavern he must have inherited from the estate of his first wife's husband? Or was it simply a matter of land speculation, as we know that even George Washington took interest in?

Maybe the bigger question is to wonder why in the world we have not been looking for Ernst more in Pennsylvania? Because of our assumptions. We have assumed that he lived only in Philadelphia before moving to Oxford, NJ. Indeed five of his eight children with Maria were baptized in Philadelphia. But clearly, Ernst was traveling outside the city, and it would seem that he had his mind and/or his heart set on acquiring some land of his own. Did he acquire the land warrant for this particular 300 acres? We don't know yet, but thanks to wildcards, the hunt has moved to Northampton County!

Knofts NO MORE!

From the day we found the marriage record on ancestry.com telling us that Earnest Man married Catharina Knofts in 1797 in Sussex, New Jersey the brick wall appeared.  How long ago was that?  At least three years, and what feels like a heck of a lot longer.  Now, in the closing hours of Mother's Day 2013, we know why we could never find any family before or after Catharina named KNOFTS.  Her maiden name was never Knofts, it was Krutz, for which there is a long list of spelling variations.  But let me tell the story of this brick wall crumbling.

When we could find no trace of the Knofts name, it wasn't hard to suspect that ancestry had made a transcription error.  After a visit to the New Jersey State Archives, we were able to locate the original marriage records, recorded by John Cline, the Justice of the Peace:

It sure does look like Knofts, doesn't it?  And on the same page are marriages of two other Knofts women, Mary and Dorothea, and the Knofts surname looks just the same.  Hmmm.  So not a transcription error.

Then we were able to locate the Bible belonging to Earnest Mann, which seemed almost too good to be true.  But what did we find?  A giant ink blot over Catherine's maiden name.  No way!  About the only thing that could be determined was that the maiden name seems relatively short based on the size of the ink blot, and the name appeared to start with a "C" and end with "ts".

So everywhere we have looked for the last many years, we check for Knofts, as well as any surnames starting with C and ending with "ts" of which Coats and Cruts were always our favorites, but for which we could never find any links. Then last fall, I visited Sussex County and met a man who is an expert on land deeds there, and he inspired me to do a study of all the Mann and Summer deeds we could find.  One in particular really jumped out, that being a deed from John Summers granting 414 acres (his father George's estate) to Andreas Crutz Sr.  Well, look at that!  There is a name that meets our search criteria!  And then it got better.  In 1802, Mr. Crutz sold half that land to Abram Fangboner, the husband of Mary Knofts.  Now we are getting really warm.

In the meantime, cousin J. had figured out that Dorothy Knofts Cutchler had also migrated to Michigan.  What was significant about Dorothy is that she only had one child, a son named Andrew Cutchler.  We felt just sure that this son might have been named for Dorothy's father, possibly Andreas Crutz.  But still we had no links.

So we've been pouring over all our notes, and here is where I will give a giant plug for Evernote. Every scrap of related information we've unearthed in the last three years is there, and all I have to do is search for "Crutz" and all those notes pop up in date order. Isn't it a wonder to be doing genealogy in this day and age? In any case, I saw some old notes that suggested Northampton County, PA as a location where Andreas Crutz might have come from before Oxford, NJ.  After visiting the area last fall, it's much more in my mind that PA. is very close to Oxford, just west and across the Delaware River. So I started searching Northampton records in the new ancestry database, Pennsylvania, Church and Town Records, 1708-1985, and what I found made my heart skip: a Confirmation for Dorothea, daughter of Andreas Krotz in 1786, and another for Catharina, daughter of same in 1790. Holy moly. Now we have a connection and the dates fit perfectly!

And now just for fun, let's look at that marriage record penned by John Cline again. After staring hard at old German script for the last several months, we start to recognize better what is there. The letter after the "K" is not an "N", it is an "R". The end of the word seems to clearly be "TS", but what is that preceding descender letter? We have thought all along it was an "F" partly because ancestry transcribed it that way, and partly because we have to agree that it looks that way. But it is not an "F". It is a "Z". In fact, the Germans had a special character to represent "TZ", which is why it appears that a "T" precedes the "Z". John Cline wrote the surname Krotzts, where he was using all the letters he could to represent the sound "TZ". He wrote it not once, but three times very neatly on the same page.  We just couldn't read it.  For three years!

And now that we examine the Lutheran church records in Northampton, we see in the very early days, the name was spelled GROTZ ("G" sounds like "K" in German) and later KROTZ.  By the time Andreas moved to Oxford, he spelled it CRUTZ.  And from the looks of the descendant names that remained in New Jersey through the mid-1800's, the name morphed once more into CRUTS and CRUTTS.  And the name inscribed in the Mann Bible is almost certainly CRUTS as the Bible was purchased in 1832 and the names were inscribed after that time.

Of course we will continue the effort to hunt down more church records, but we suddenly feel that all the pieces are falling together.  Our fourth great-grandmother, wife of first-generation-born-in-America Earnest Man, was named Catharina Cruts.  She was the mother of 10 known children, 7 of whom would make the journey with her in her 60s to a new home in Michigan.  And now Catharina is somebody we can really get to know, now that we are no longer distracted by the surname KNOFTS, which in fact, never existed.  This is one brick wall that I'm not going to miss.

More About Straw Church

Cousin J sent me the following info which was written quite some time ago but is great in its summary of the churches in that area back in the early days.  And since I can't seem to keep it straight in my brain, I thought I would post it here, which always helps me remember better!


http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/NJSUSSEX/1998-04/0893178855
From: Diane Ward < dsives@ROOTSQUEST.com>
Subject: St James Lutheran Church, Greenwich, Warren County
Date: Tue, 21 Apr 1998 13:14:15 -0400
Since Warren County was a part of Essex County, and there is no Warren County mailing list yet, I have decided to provide a few facts here about this church. I am a lookup volunteer for Warren County as I have the cemetery inscriptions and yesterday, I added the Baptisms beginning in 1770 - 1836 and a list of communicants from various dates.

The article which was in The Genealogical Magazine of New Jersey in Volumes 8 and 9 talks about the early church.

It says that the early records of the church..those from about 1750 to 1769 have been lost. Originally there was a union between the German Reformed and the Lutheran Churches but the German Reformed church fizzled out by people moving away and deaths. The church, early on, was affiliated with St. Michael's Lutheran Church in Philadelphia.

Traditions has it that the first church was constructed of logs and thatched with straw..this is how it became known as "The Straw Church".

The second church was built in 1790. The third building was built in 1834.

The first pastors beginning in the year 1770 were Christian Streit and Peter Muhlenburg. Peter Muhlenburg, at the time, was the resident clergyman of Zion Lutheran Church at New Germantown (now Oldwick), Hunterdon county. This was the same Peter Muhlenburg who became famous as the Revolutionary General. Christian Streit was also the pastor of a Lutheran church at Easton, PA.