Exploring my Heritage Part 1: Indian Attack in 1757

Last year Donna gifted me an Ancestry.com DNA test. According to the spit I sent them, I’m:

   38% British

   17% South European

   14% West European

   11% Irish/Scots/Welsh

     9% Scandinavian

     7% East European

     3% Spanish/Portuguese

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That surprised me – I thought I was mostly Scots, German, and Swiss – and got me interested in my heritage.

I have collected a good amount of genealogical information from my mom, who was our family historian. Most of the information I have is on my maternal grandfather’s side of the family tree.

I have records of my mother’s side of the family going back eight generations before me, to the birth in 1704 of Jacob Hochstetler, who emigrated from Germany in 1736 with his wife to the American colony of Pennsylvania. Below is a hair-raising account according to Descendants of Jacob Hochstetler, the Immigrant of 1736, by Rev. Harvey Hochstetler D.D.:

“Jacob Hochstetler, born 1704, his wife nee Lorentz (Amish Faith) with one or more of their children left the German states and arrived in America on September 1, 1736, landing at Philadelphia on the ship Harle. The family eventually settled in Berks County, Pennsylvania. There on September 20, 1757 the mother and two sons were killed by Indians. The father and two sons were taken prisoner. Jacob Hochstetler escaped and returned to white settlements after some three years. The two sons returned to their father, but not until late in 1764 or 1765. The surviving children were John, the former prisoners Joseph and Christian, and Barbara.”

There is no subsequent record of the surviving prisoners. But John Hochstetler married Catherine Hertzler and moved from Berks County to Somerset County about December 1784 and had 10 children.

This is consistent with the background report Ancestry.com provided along with the DNA makeup results:

“In the 1700s, English immigrants came to colonial Virginia to settle its untamed lands. Some were prisoners or indentured servants; others were the second or third sons of landed gentry who chose to leave Britain because of inheritance laws that favored first-born sons. Pennsylvania offered land and relief to the persecuted Scots-Irish, descendants of Scots who migrated to Ulster, Ireland, in the 1600s. Germans escaping the aftermath of wars, harsh winters, and heavy taxes of the Palatinate region in Germany’s Rhine Valley also settled in Pennsylvania.

“When the Ohio River Valley opened for settlement after the Revolutionary War, hearty English, German, Scots, and Scots-Irish farmers moved to the frontier. After a series of brutal wars with native tribes, they pushed west into the prairies. Settlers planted corn and turned the land into what became known as the “Corn Belt.” Over the years, railroads, factories, and auto plants transformed the wilderness region into an urban and commercial land.”

One of John and Catherine’ sons, John, married Frances Mast and had 11 children, including Solomon, who married Barbara Zug and moved to Walnut Creek Township, Ohio. Their daughter, Veronica, married Joseph Miller in 1829. They had two children before Joseph died in 1833. In 1839 Veronica married Elias Egleson and they had Catherine, Anna, Samuel, and Noah, who was born in 1847 at Walnut Creek, Ohio.

In March 1872 at Ragersville, Ohio, Noah Egleson married Margaret Zehnder, the daughter of John and Anna (Herren) Zehnder of Winesburg, Ohio, and they moved to Pickens, West Virginia.

Noah and Margaret Egleson had two sons, William in 1873 in Holmes County and Edwin in 1880. In 1898 in Helvetica, West Virginia, William Egleson married Callie Flora Vogel, daughter of Bernhardt Vogel (1837 – 1904) and Mattie Wenger, who was born in 1846 in Switzerland. William and Callie are buried in Elkins, West Virginia.

William and Callie Egleson had two sons, Harley (1899) and Earl (1902). Earl and his wife, Blanche Leona Harper Egleson, who was born in 1906 in Alpena, West Virginia, had one daughter, Ellen Blanche (March 9, 1931). Ellen is my mother.

I have a picture in my study of an Egleson family get-together from the early 1900s on Turkey Bone Mountain, West Virginia. William is front and center of the 20 or so clan members holding a fiddle. Other men are holding various other musical instruments. His wife Callie is holding her baby Earl, and Harley is in there too. I also have in my study the fiddle that William is holding in the picture.

I may have to take a fact-finding trip to West Virginia this year.