In The Beginning

 

                               In the beginning - how my family history obsession started.

It happened in Brookside NJ in our family home. I believe I was probably about 16 years old at the time, so around 1962. I don’t recall exactly why I was in the attic with my mom (my bedroom had a door that accessed the attic). One of the many boxes in there held quite a few items from her parents. Inside that box she took out another smaller box that held a document that was folded up much like a paper road map. Once unfolded it was very large. I have come to learn later that its dimensions were 4’ by 12’. It was a huge printed family history chart.

I remember my mom showing me where her father’s name had been written in next to his older brothers, as he was born in 1888, one year after the family tree had been printed in 1887. Looking back on this, I probably should have been more amazed than I was about the size and scope of this huge document. Nevertheless, it must have made a pretty big impression on me, as I always remembered it. I believe my mom told me a little bit about the tree, and that it went back to the 1600’s. 

Over the next few years, I would go into the attic once in a while and take it out of the box and look at it. I remembered the original ancestor’s name: Christopher Sower, and that always stuck with me. But if I looked at any other names, I didn’t recall them. And I certainly didn’t fully appreciate all the data in the tree, with 10 generations of names, including birth, death and marriage dates.

So time passed, I went to college, married a few years after that and moved away, and my parents sold their house in NJ and retired to North Carolina.  I seem to recall that some time after that my mom told me that the Sower Family tree had accidentally been lost in their move. She was devastated.

More time passed. Now we are in the beginnings of the internet. I can’t tell you why, but probably around the time ancestry.com came online, some memory was sparked, and I decided to try to figure out who this Christopher Sower was (I still remembered his name)  but not how he was related to me. I did remember that it was on my mom’s father’s side, but that was all. My grandfather’s last name was Harley though, not Sower.

Sower Tree heading

 

Next, I did exactly what I learned later was the exact wrong way to research. Instead of going backwards from my grandfather, I tried to go forward in time from Christopher Sower, trying to figure out how the Harley line joined the Sower line. As you can imagine there were lot of dead ends. I didn’t even really know if the surname association was maternal or paternal before him.

But, by much trial and error, I finally did make the connection. And l learned that Christopher Sower (Sauer) senior is my 6th great-grandfather! The bonus was that he was a pretty famous person in the 1700’s in Philadelphia area. He was quite the entrepreneur, maybe most well known for printing the first German language bibles in America. His descendants went on to found the Sower Printing Company in Philadelphia, which partially explains how the monstrous family history chart was printed.

I don’t know how many were originally printed, but my guess it that they were made available to living descendants of Christopher Sower, of which my grandfather, or more likely at that time his father, was one. I still mourn the loss of the chart that we had in our possession, but I was able to find images of it on the Family Search website..And years later, I was able to see one in person at the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul, MN. I requested the item, and they brought it out to me so I could hold and examine it. Wow, that was incredible, to actually hold one just the the one that had been lost to our family many years ago.

If you would like to see the chart on Family Search website (you need a free account) you can do so here:  

https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QHV-V38K-84BM?cat=338953&i=6

(it is in 34 different images, so that it is readable)

I still hold out hope that one day this item will show up on ebay for sale. I have an automatic search set up to alert me. But at least I know that I can view it on Family Search, and that is such a powerful thing to have available. It is what started me on my journey of family history research, and I treasure it !!

Below is a section of one image of the chart that shows part of the surname index on the right with James Alonzo Harley, my great grandfather (green arrow), and Jacob Linwood Harley, my grandfather’s older living brother (red arrow).  The name on the left is the same older brother's name circled in red. If my grandfather had been born before this chart was printed, his name Clarence Wilbur Harley would have been right under that. 

Harley surname on tree