Soulfood

Last weekend I gathered with my dad’s family to remember his mother, Della, who passed into glory on May 2nd a little less than 6 months past her 100th birthday. It was a sweet and beautiful time!

After the funeral on Friday, several of us (my brother Jesse, my youngest son Levi, my cousin Daryl, his wife Heather, and I) drove up to Wyomissing to visit the Stoltzfus Homestead.

I have always been told that the Stoltzfus family came from the same stock as most Anabaptists, namely from southern Germany and Switzerland. On my mother’s side that is certainly true. But it turns out that Nicholas Stoltzfus was the son of a Lutheran minister from northern Germany, whose father married a woman of Scandinavian descent (a Bergmann). Nicholas’s father died while he was young and his mother remarried to a French Huegenot by the name of Bellaire. They moved to Zweibrücken in the southwest of Germany (on the Rhine River) and there Nicholas met an Anabaptist girl named Anna Bachmann.

Nicholas, as the son of a Lutheran minister whose father had been a courtier, was forbidden to marry a peasant like Anna. Anabaptists, as rebellious schismatics in the eyes of the State, were barred from owning land. Nicholas married her at the price of banishment from Zweibrücken, and eventually left Europe for the friendlier climes of Pennsylvania in 1766. The rest, as they say, is history. 10 generations or so later along came I.

My (very distant) cousin Elam, a 9th generation descendant, went to Germany (supported by the Amish Stoltzfus family) to track down these facts, and was able to trace our line back to a Paul Steltzenfuss who was the chief shepherd of a Germanic queen. The area where the sheep grazed was boggy, and Paul often wore stilts while working to bring them home. Hence the name Steltzenfuss – stilt-footed. Over time this evolved into Stoltzfus (proud-foot).

Paul’s son Johann, patronized by his father’s, uh, patroness, attended the university at Jena and became a Lutheran minister.

We met Elam at the Stoltzfus homestead, which is steadily being restored by the Stoltzfus Family 501c(3) organization with Elam’s guidance. He gave us a fascinating private tour of the place, which includes a replica of the bunks on the English ship Polly on which Nicholas and his family voyaged from Rotterdam to the New World.

It was a full-on treat to spend that time with Elam and share our family history. I hope to take more of my family there later on, including my grandchildren!