The One Where I Feel Incredibly Honored

Last week I received some exciting news from the International Society of Family History Writers and Editors (ISFHWE). ISFHWE encourages “excellence in writing and editorial standards in genealogical publishing,” and to promote that goal they host an annual Excellence-in-Writing Competition. I submitted entries in the “Columns” and “Published Articles” categories for this year’s contest. After I sent them in, I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind for awhile. That is, until this message from Tina Sansone, the competition coordinator, showed up in my inbox:

Dear Shelley,

Congratulations! You have won the following in the ISFHWE “Excellence in Writing” competition:

1st Place Columns: Shelley K. Bishop, “The Legacy of Mary Comfort Eberhard”

2nd Place Articles: Shelley K. Bishop, “Turning Forests into Farms: The George Clark Family of Licking and Delaware Counties, Ohio”

Woohoo! I’m thrilled, to say the least, and so honored to have won awards in two categories. A hearty congratulations to all the other award winners. As I look over the names on the ISFHWE announcement, I’m humbled to be in such great company.

Like many genealogists, I write primarily to share and preserve what I’ve learned from researching my ancestors. At the same time, I try to find universal themes within my family’s story that might strike a chord with a wider audience. But it’s hard to know if I’ve succeeded in doing that or not until something like this happens. When it does, it’s oh-so-rewarding.

"The Legacy of Mary Comfort Eberhard” first appeared here, as a post on A Sense of Family, on February 6, 2013. It grew out of my desire to share some of my grandmother’s stories about her mother, coupled with fascinating information I found in an old dairy company newsletter. Telling the stories of our female ancestors, who generally show up in fewer official records than men, can present special challenges. Digging into home sources such as letters, baby books, newspaper clippings, scrapbooks, and keepsakes—some of which may be held by other relatives—can lead to neat discoveries about their lives.

“Turning Forests into Farms: The George Clark Family of Licking and Delaware Counties, Ohio” was originally published in the Winter 2013 issue of the Ohio Genealogical Society Quarterly (Vol. 53, No. 4). It traces one branch of my family tree through four generations, beginning with their 1811 arrival in the Ohio frontier. Weaving information from early land office registers, deeds, vital records, agricultural censuses, newspapers, cemeteries, and other records together with social history sources like county histories, published memoirs, and maps, I show how the family’s growth echoed—and was tragically affected by—the times they lived in.

ISFHWE will be publishing all the articles they awarded prizes to in future issues of Columns, their quarterly newsletter. You can become a member and read them all for just $20. I know I’m looking forward to some excellent reading in the coming months.

Thank you to ISFHWE and its judges for this recognition. Thanks also to the Ohio Genealogical Society for publishing my work, and to all my blog readers. It’s a pleasure to be writing for you. Now, what story should I work on next?...

--Shelley

Related Posts:

Five Lessons Learned While Writing

The Legacy of Mary Comfort Eberhard

George Clark, Ohio Pioneer: 52 Ancestors

A Fearless Females Success Story

For the last four years, Lisa Alzo has offered Fearless Females: 31 Blogging Prompts to Celebrate Women’s History Month. While I’ve only posted stories on a few of the prompts, I tend to write about the women in my family throughout the year. Recently, a post I wrote in February on my great-grandmother, Mary Eberhard Comfort, led to emails from three new cousins. We’ve been corresponding, and I wanted to share an example of how a simple blog post can lead to some pretty amazing collaboration.

Mary’s mother was Polly Scheirer, whose photo I posted as a Fearless Female in a short post in 2011. I didn’t have much information on Polly’s life at the time, nor have I attempted to research her since. I just had a small copy of her image, labeled on the back by my grandmother, Nora Eberhard Ballenger. But my new-found cousins not only had more information about Polly—it turns out they also had the original charcoal drawing that my image must have been made from. The thing was, the drawing was unidentified, and they had no idea who it was of. It had nearly been thrown out several times over the years. Now, thanks to their willingness to keep an unknown drawing, my Grandma’s foresight in labeling her small copy, and my posting it on my blog, we’ve all come together. The drawing is identified, and we’re in the process of sharing what we know about the Comfort and Scheirer families, to everyone’s mutual benefit. That’s a modern genealogical success story, in my book.

 

Here are the women in this line, and the posts I’ve written about each of them:

My grandmother, Nora Eberhard, who married Lloyd R. Ballenger:

There’s One in Every Family: The Life of the Party

Eberhard Children

Hunt School Souvenir

Thanksgiving at the Kids’ Table

 

My great-grandmother, Mary Comfort, who married John Llewelyn Eberhard:

The Legacy of Mary Comfort Eberhard

Baptismal Fraktur of Mary Comfort

Eberhards at Otterbein Cemetery

My great-great-grandmother, Polly Scheirer, who married Lewis A. Comfort:

Polly Scheirer Comfort: A Fearless Female

 

This experience has given me a new incentive to keep posting these kinds of pictures and stories about the women--and men--in my family. After all, you never know when someone might find one and reach out (that’s one reason why I put my email address on my home page). And I love making new connections with long-lost cousins, don’t you?

--Shelley

The Legacy of Mary Comfort Eberhard

Some people leave great legacies in business, politics, or education. Others are recognized for their military service, philanthropy, or contributions to science. Mary Comfort Eberhard left a different kind of legacy—humbler, perhaps, but impressive nonetheless. She raised sixteen children to adulthood in the farmlands of Pennsylvania and Ohio at the turn of the 20^th century.

One of her daughters, Nora Eberhard Ballenger, would later recall that Mary used to bake 12 to 14 loaves of bread, including her favorite pan rolls, twice a week. “My mother never baked under 16 to 20 pies and two large cakes on weekends. We always had a great crowd,” she remembered. “We grew almost everything we ate—vegetables, meats, eggs. She made her own dumplings and even churned her own butter.”

A beautifully illustrated fraktur, written in German, shows that Mary Madina Comfort was born 28 May 1875 in Whitehall Township, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania. Her parents were Lewis Comfort and Polly Scheirer Comfort.¹ On Christmas Eve, 1891, when Mary was 16 years old, she married John Llewellyn Eberhard in Allentown.² No doubt their Christmas that year was a merry one—and it would be the only one they celebrated without a child in the house for more than 40 years.

Mary and Llewellyn made a home for themselves in Salisbury Township, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, where he worked as a milk dealer. Their first baby was born in August 1892. Others followed, more or less every other year. By January 1902, there were six little Eberhards: Eva, Roy, Harold, Helen, Mabel, and Irma.³

In 1903, they decided to move west to the area around Bellefontaine, Ohio, where Llewellyn’s brother William Eberhard and his wife lived. They rented a farm, and Llewellyn resumed his dairy work. Mary resumed cooking, cleaning, and caring for her large brood. By 1910 she had given birth to seven more children: Emma, Enoch, Bert, Clarence, Carrie, Anna, and Nora.⁴

Bert and Clarence were twins, born prematurely. Mary would later tell Nora that she did her best to keep the tiny babies alive, nestling them in boxes laid in front of the open woodstove oven door. But despite her efforts, both boys died within a few days.

In 1913 the family moved again, this time to farmland between Galena and Johnstown, Ohio. There they put down roots in the community, and Mary started doing “custom hatchings”—incubating certain varieties of chicken eggs, to order, for customers. She used her egg money to supplement the income from Llewellyn’s dairy work. Meanwhile, she had five more children: Bertha, Robert, Georgia, Blanche, and, lastly, Mildred, in 1920.⁵

An article in the June 1929 edition of The Milky Way, published by the Moores & Ross dairy company, featured Llewellyn Eberhard and his family. “Mrs. Eberhard uses one room of the house as an incubator room, and does custom hatchings at 3½ cents an egg,” it reported. “She has been doing this for 15 years. The incubator has a capacity of 3000 eggs. Mrs. Eberhard is also quite a baker. She bakes 14 loaves of bread at one time, twice a week. It is nothing for her to bake 22 pies, four cakes, 200 doughnuts and 200 cookies at one baking.”⁶

Of course, Mary didn’t do everything alone. The children all had chores, either in the house, barn, or garden, depending on the season and day of the week. Nora preferred the house chores, because she didn’t like the smell of the cows. On washing day, Mary would organize several of them into a makeshift assembly line to get the clothes and sheets through the hand-cranked washer and wringer and out onto the clothesline. Nora sometimes helped her mother on baking days, and other times it was her job to tend to the younger children and keep them out from underfoot.⁷

Eventually, as the children grew up and moved out of the house, Mary’s baking, laundry, and egg-hatching responsibilities eased. She and Llewellyn celebrated their golden wedding anniversary with their family on December 21, 1941. He had retired three years previously, and the hard work of Mary’s earlier years was behind her as well.

On April 15, 1958, Mary Madina Comfort Eberhard passed away in Sunbury, Ohio, at the age of 82. Her obituary named her 15 surviving children (Helen predeceased her), and noted that she left 39 grandchildren, 44 great-grandchildren, and 1 great-great-grandchild. She was buried in Otterbein Cemetery in Westerville.⁸

Today, Mary’s legacy lives on in her many descendents, which now include an untold number of great-, great-great-, and great-great-great-grandchildren. She wasn’t rich by any monetary standard, and her days were filled with the hard, plain work of raising a family and keeping house. But somehow, I don’t think she would have changed a thing. My only regret is that I wasn’t born in time to sample her baking.

--Shelley

© Shelley Bishop 2013.

Sources:

1.     Mary Madina Comfort (Kumfert) fraktur, birth and baptism, 1875 (Whitehall Township, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania); privately held.

2.     Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, marriage certificate no. 3753 (1891), Llewellyn John Eberhard and Mary M. Comfort; Court of Common Pleas, Orphan’s Court Division, Allentown.

3.     1900 U.S. Census, Salisbury Twp., Lehigh Co., Pennsylvania, population schedule, E.D. 49, p. 5B, dwelling 95, family 97, Lwellyn J. Eberhard; digital images, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com: accessed 14 Oct 2008); citing NARA microfilm publication T623, roll 1429.

4.     1910 U.S. Census, Rushcreek Twp., Logan County, Ohio, population schedule, E.D. 144, p. 9B, dwelling 216, family 222, Llewellin Eberhard; digital image, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com: accessed 13 Aug 2008); citing NARA microfilm publication T624, roll 1205.

5.     1920 U.S. Census, Harlem Twp., Delaware Co., Ohio, population schedule, E.D. 72, p. , dwelling 99, family 99, Llewellyn Eberhard; digital image, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com: accessed 13 Aug 2008); citing NARA microfilm publication T625, roll 1377.

6.     Moores & Ross, Inc., “The Milky Way”, vol. 5 no. 6, June 1929; photograph and article on the L. J. Eberhard family (cover and p.7); privately held.

7.     Personal recollections by Nora Eberhard Ballenger, collected over a period of years by Shelley Ballenger Bishop and Edward Ballenger II.

8.     Mary M. Eberhard obituary, Columbus Evening Dispatch (Columbus, Ohio), 16 April 1958, p. 7A.

Polly Scheirer Comfort: A Fearless Female for Wordless Wednesday

This is the only image I have of my great-great-grandmother, Polly Scheirer Comfort. It’s scanned from a photo that belonged to my grandmother, Nora Eberhard Ballenger. On the back she wrote “Mom’s Mom.”

Nora’s mom (my great-grandmother) was Mary Comfort Eberhard. Our family is lucky enough to have Mary’s baptismal fraktur, written in German, from Lehigh County, Pennsylvania. I wrote about this family treasure in Baptismal Fraktur of Mary Comfort. The certificate names Polly Scheirer as Mary’s mother.

I’m still searching for details to document Polly’s life. Polly was a common nickname for Mary or the German name Magdalena, so one of those was probably her given name. I know she was married to Louis Comfort by 1870, and that they lived in Lehigh County. In addition to her daughter Mary, she also had a son, Henry Comfort.

I chose Polly’s picture today in keeping with Lisa Alzo's “Fearless Females” theme for Women’s History Month on The Accidental Genealogist. Even though I don’t know much about Polly, she looks like a pretty strong woman to me. 

Baptismal Fraktur of Mary Comfort - Treasure Chest Thursday

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my surprise discovery of two large, old rolled-up parchments in my aunt’s basement. The parchments, beautifully illustrated and written in Gothic German, turned out to be the original baptismal frakturs of my great-grandparents, John Llewellyn Eberhard and Mary Madina Comfort. To me, this discovery of original documents that my aunt didn’t realize she had and couldn’t identify brought home the old adage, “You never know unless you ask.” I think a lot of family historians can relate to finding pieces of their puzzle in places they never expected.

In that first post, I presented Llewellyn’s certificate, which you can see here. Today I’d like to share Mary Comfort’s fraktur. I’m no expert at reading German script, but I've been told it’s not all that difficult to decipher the family information from records like these. Those of you that have more experience with this are welcome to correct any errors you see! Here is the portion of Mary’s certificate with her birth and baptism information:

My admittedly very rough translation is as follows:

Louis A. Kumfert

and his wife Polly

who was born Scheirer

had a daughter born to them on the 28^th day of

May in the year 1875

Their daughter was born in Whitehall

Township in Lehigh County

in the state of Pennsylvania in North America, and was

baptized on the 18^th day of November in

the year 1875 by the Pastor J. S. 

Renninger and given the name

Mary Madina

The sponsors are:

the parents

[signed] Wm. Gross

Just goes to show, like love in Love Actually (one of my favorite movies), treasure is all around us!

Related posts:

Eberhards at Otterbein - Tombstone Tuesday

You Never Know Unless You Ask

Eberhards at Otterbein - Tombstone Tuesday

My great-grandparents are buried side-by-side in Otterbein Cemetery in Westerville, Ohio.

Their tombstone reads:

                                             EBERHARD

                         FATHER                             MOTHER

                       LLEWELLYN J.                      MARY M.

                     JAN. 29, 1868                  MAY 28, 1875

                    SEPT. 11, 1946                 APRIL 15, 1958

The unexpected discovery of Llewellyn’s original baptismal fraktur (see my earlier post, You Never Know Unless You Ask) showed that he was actually named John Llewellyn. The use of John as a forename was a common practice in German families. He always went by Llewellyn, though. He was born in Upper Milford Township, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania to parents Catherine and David Eberhard. He died at age 78 in Galena, Delaware County, Ohio.

Mary Madina Comfort was born in Whitehall Township, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania to parents Polly and Louis Comfort. She and Llewellyn had a Christmas Eve wedding. They were married December 24, 1891, in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She was 82 years old when she died in Sunbury, Ohio.

As both of them died before I was born, I never knew either one, but my grandmother gave me a few pictures. Here’s my favorite:

They were hard-working people, raising 16 children on a dairy farm, but their faces look kind. Wish I had had the chance to know them.

Related Posts:

You Never Know Unless You Ask

The Life of the Party: There's One in Every Family

Eberhard Children

 

You Never Know Unless You Ask - Treasure Chest Thursday

One afternoon last year, my aunts and I were sorting through some old pictures and cards that my grandmother, Nora Eberhard Ballenger, had kept. There were some older pictures, which I gratefully scanned and copied, but a lot of newer ones too, including many of my own children which I had actually given Grandma. The day was not yielding as much “good stuff” as I had hoped.

I happened to mention to my aunt that I was looking for something that might tell me whether Nora’s father’s name was John Llewellyn or Llewellyn John Eberhard. He usually went by the latter, but it appeared in various records both ways. Someone with a better understanding of German heritage had told me that if I could find his baptismal record, it should settle the matter.

“I wonder if that’s what that is?” she mused. “What?” I asked. “Oh, it’s down the basement. It’s all rolled up. I don’t know what it is.” Well, I was curious by then. I asked if she’d look. She said she’d see if she could find it. Whatever it was.

She came up awhile later with two thin, brittle, rolled-up parchments. We gingerly unrolled one. Now, I’d never seen anything like it before, and neither of us can read a word of German, but it didn’t take long to figure out what it was. It was paydirt: his original baptismal certificate, or fraktur, in all its decorated glory. And she not only had the one for John Llewellyn (as it turns out he was named), but she had the one for his wife, Mary Madina Comfort, as well.

Nora was the eleventh out of sixteen Eberhard children. How the frakturs happened to go to her is a mystery to me. She never mentioned them, to my knowledge. And if I hadn’t wondered aloud about John’s name that day, I imagine they’d still be hiding out in my aunt’s basement. Just goes to show you. You never know unless you ask.

My aunt generously made full-size copies of the certificates for me. What you see here is the section with the baptismal information. I haven’t had it fully translated yet, but in my best attempt to read it (pardon my German), I believe it says:

Mr. David Eberhart

and his wife Catharina

who was born Eisenhart

had born to them a son on the 29^th day

of January in the year 1868

This son was born in Upper Milford

Township Lehigh County, in

the state of Pennsylvania in North America and

on the 16^th day of May in the year

1868 has been baptized

and given the name John Llewellen

The sponsors are:

Joel Schafer and his wife Polly

Needless to say, I went home happy that day!

Related Posts:

There's One in Every Family: The Life of the Party

Eberhard Children

Hunt School Souvenir - Treasure Chest Thursday