JUNE NEWSLETTER
I have worked the month on the descendants of Sarah Mower (daughter of Andrew) who married Samuel Diehl. I have located to date, 530 of her direct descendants. Many lived and died in Bedford County, Pa. There are many descendants of hers still living in that area.
I hired Jim Boor, a Bedford County genealogist, to help me locate some of the Diehl descendants. He is a school teacher who loves genealogy and does work professionally in his off hours and during the summer. He charges the outrageous sum of $5 per hour! (A person really has to love the work to work for such wages). He has helped me locate many of our relatives.
Jim can do things in Bedford, Pa that I need done and simply can not do from here in Wyoming. He can run to the courthouse and check for a birth, marriage or death record. He can contact living descendants for us and acquire information. As a hobby he collects obituaries. He has listed these alphabetically and sells them according to surnames. I purchased about 20 photocopied pages of obituaries from him of Diehls. From this I located over 30 ancestors, including birth and death dates, brothers and sisters, former marriages, etc. This is extremely valuable to us as researchers.
I was able to put families together, identify lost children, and figure out who many of the female descendants had married and where they were living at the time the obituary was written. All of these Diehls are basically cousins of ours and all descend from Sarah Mower. I can't tell you what a great feeling it is to see over 500 members of a family linked together and tied into our Maurer line. I should be ready by this fall to submit several hundred of these relatives for temple work.
I am also working on the descendants of Mahala Mower, daughter of Henry Mower Sr. We are making progress on that line and are making continuous submissions of her descendants. It is a marvelous thing to me to see records become available for our use. Out of the clear-blue we receive letters, leads, information and "stumble" onto books, microfilms and people who "just happen" to have the materials which lead us one step forward to an ancestor. I have often told my wife that if I didn't have to earn a living for my family, I could easily spend what remains of my life doing this work full time. It is the most rewarding work I have ever been involved in.
Summer is upon us and we hope to have several expeditions of a week or two each to the library this summer. If you will let us know before June 20th when your Mower Reunions are, we will publish them in the Newsletter for July. We expect a report from our professional genealogist by July 1st giving us current status of the research efforts to trace the origins of Michael Maurer.