PABERKS-L Archives

From: Dora Smith <>
Subject: [PABERKS] prominent Lt John Wagner of Cumru,unpropertied people in Cumru, Baptists
Date: Sat, 1 Jul 2000 16:58:31 -0700 (PDT)

Here are several excerpts from a letter someone
wrote me.

There was one fairly prominent Wagner family in
Cumru, a Lt. John Wagner
with wife Susannah. They had about 10 kids, and
the third child was named
Henry. Lt. John (from the Revolutionary War) had
a decent-sized acreage; I
have seen his will in Reading.

Yes, Cumru is right across the river from Exeter,

just to the southwest.

you are right that
there were so many obscure
Wagners out of Berks, propertyless and hanging on

by their teeth, and
particularly in Cumru, which was poor and largely

Welsh Baptist. There was
not even a Reformed Church for them in Cumru that

I can find (none, at
least, in Glattfelter's book, 1948).

OK, start spilling it, folks. This is the first
I've heard of a prominent Revolutionary War era
Johannes Wagner in Berks County, let alone with
wife Susanna. My Henry WAgner married to
Elizabeth, having children apparently in Alsace
or Exeter by the 1770's begin showing up in
Schwarwald's records in 1782, constantly
exchanged baptismal sponsorship of children with
Johannes Wagner and wife Susanna, apparently of
Exeter too but it's very hard to tell. They also
begin to show up in the Schwarzwald records in
1782, which does not mean they lived in Reading
or took up a new place of residence in 1782. As
you can see from below, Cumru was not on the
other side of the county from Alsace and Exeter,
where someone told me it is, it was adjacent to
Exeter. Though from the description I am
wondering if alot of people kind of think the
place was on the other side of the galaxy from
all those prosperous, wealthy, moderately
religious and completely sane people we on these
lists mostly think were our Berks County
ancestors. Me included - I've sure never heard
anyone was poor here, before, let alone Welsh
Baptist - certainly never entertained the
possibility! :/ Further, a Johannes Wagner
married Susanna Liesz, and Johannes and Susanna's
children were often sponsored by other Liesz's.

Can people please tell me more about this Lt.
Johannes/ John Wagner of the Revolutionary War
and his wife Susan - and their ten children?
Also, exactly where they lived and owned land.
And where to find information on this family.

Also, I had assumed that John and Henry Wagner
owned land if they lived in Berks County, had
alot of children and did not live in Reading.
What would those two have done and where would
they or anyone else have lived in Exeter, Alsace
and Cumru if they did not own land? If they
would have needed to have some sort of a trade in
lieu of owning land, where might I find some sort
of record of it? Were most people in Cumru poor?
Did most people who did own land there own small
amounts of it? I hear mostly about people in
Berks County who owned huge quantities of land
from very early points in time, had manic energy
levels and drive, and became extremely
prosperous. Like my Deharts, atleast one Burkhart
family, the Keim's, and the Schneiders, and the
Wagner family of Bern.

For that matter, where do I find tax records for
Berks County for 1770 through 1810? I wrote to
the Berks County tax office, sent a few bucks for
zeroxing, and a SASE, and never got any response
- and there is zit anywhere I can find on even
how to get those records. Lot of info on how to
get wills, vital records - but not on how to get
tax records.

Also, this is the first I've heard about Welsh
Baptists in Cumru. I wonder how it can be that
there is so little information and apparent
awareness on those of these lists that pertain to
that area, that THOSE varmints were around? It's
a far more glaring and important thing to miss
than being unaware of poverty. Is it true that
this is the only church that was there for people
to attend? Where did people of German background
who lived in Cumru actually attend church? My
own staunchly mixed Presbyterian and Reformed
ancestors who lived in southeastern Chester
County also lived in a town whose only church was
Welsh Baptist; they drove 12 miles to a nearby
town where there was a Presbyterian church every
Sunday.

People should be aware of it if this church was
really there and many people in that place
belonged to it, if only because it is nearly
impossible to find any sort of vital records on
any family that was Welsh/ Primitive Baptist.
Just the way people need to know that Spies
Church in Alsace kept burning down and losing its
records, though people told me that alot faster
than they told me there were Welsh Baptists! The
Welsh Baptists were so strict they didn't even
accept most children of their members, I think
they drove most of them away which was not easy
to accomplish in the 18th century, they managed
to alienate my Dehaven 4th cousin's ancestor
completely from religion ca 1820 in a town where
everyone was religious, and they accepted nobody
before adulthood. This isn't because they were
Welsh; in fact, in Pennsylvania before many years
had gone by a large proportion of them weren't
Welsh at all; it is because they were among the
most extreme, if oldest, of the Anabaptist sects,
and that accounts for why groups of these
particular Welsh came to this country. To this
day, these "Give me that old time religion"
creators of the Old Time Bible Hour or whatever
its called think Jerry Falwell and Pat Roberts,
and the entire Southern Baptist movement (the
mainstream Fundamentalist church of the South,
and the parent church of Billy Graham) are left
wing liberals in league with Satan. They are not
to be confused with the Baptist movement, which
evolved from the Anabaptist movement and once
included the Primitive Baptists, and I think also
took part in the Great Awakening, but in the
North and in urban areas quickly became a liberal
denomination that many of our nation's early
leaders belonged to, similar to the Pennsylvania
Dutch Brethren. That is why few Welsh Baptist
christening records exist and why they don't name
peoples' parents.

It also is important to knowing the context of
one's ancestry, and can be a clue to finding
one's ancestors. Where was the nearest very
extreme church or what was the most extreme
church around - my ancestors were fairly
predictably at THAT one! I am tracing a family
history of manic depression that as manic
depression often does branches out many ways in
my lines, and nearly all people who were my
ancestors were very prone to joining movements of
this nature - nearly any sect that was more
intense and evangelical than the Reformed and the
Presbyterians, and in the case of my father's
people, even the Puritans. (There were of course
exceptions - my Rice, Willard and DAvis
ancestors, who prospered and led communities when
manic and migrated every time they got into a
depressed phase, were simply sales geniuses
addicted to land speculation, who though
consistently religiously correct sometimes got
executed as witches for land speculation and
psychotic episodes, and one of my Deharts, whose
mother is thought to most likely have come from
an Oley New Born family, kind of cyclically went
to Philadelphia, opened up a big weaving shop,
and lived in the two (yup, two) mansions he
bought across the street from the mayor's
residence, got ruined, and crawled home.) My
seeming Ritter, Schneider and Keim connections
turn out to all have been Moravian! None of them
were ORIGINALLY Moravian - though some had been
Mennonite. Someone recently posted to one of
these lists that the Moravians were Oley's
version of the Great Awakening! You know, like
Rev. Jonathan Edwards, who incidentally is also
my ancestor - Tuttle line. Some of my people in
Chester County (other children of the inlaws)
became Welsh Baptists because the Dehavens were
originally Anabaptist, got themselves chased
around Europe in circles and burned at the stake
everytime they stopped to catch their breaths,
and never changed their temperament; and because
the descendants of Jesse Dehaven have always been
the most seriously manic depressive temperament
with consistent mental health problems of the
Dehavens, and the Presbyterians and Reformed
weren't intensely enough Calvinistic and
Evangelical for them. Now that I know where the
Welsh Baptists were, it sounds possible that my
Burkhart and Wagner ancestors may have been drawn
to Cumru like the place had a magnet. A-a-a-rgh!

Yours,
Dora Smith

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• [PABERKS] prominent Lt John Wagner of Cumru,unpropertied people in Cumru, Baptists by Dora Smith <>