Olde Guest Column

Stories of the Sheffler Family as your ancestors might tell them. They don't remember all the details - it's been a long time - but they make up for it in perspective. The articles below are both real and imagined. Letters and documents revealing details of our colonial era immigrant family and the generations that followed.

Digging Up The Shefflers - The Main Site. All the Sheffler History News & Updates.
George Sheffler 1779 - The Descendancy. George's Kids. Their Kids. (Etc)

Saturday, October 23, 2004

Claude LaVern Cripe, born 1892 - Part 1

[ NOTE - The following is transcribed from an audiotape recording made by Claude Cripe on July 4, 1967. Anything showing up in brackets such as this note are by the transcriber Don Sheffler. Anything in parentheses ( ) are asides spoken by Claude. I attempted to capture all pauses and pronunciations in Claude's speach and so mispellings may occur to indicate how the word was spoken, and instructions to stop or start the tape from Claude ("Shut her off") are included ]

[Claude's mother was Jesse Mae Sheffler, daughter of Levi Warren Sheffler, son of Frederick Sheffler, son of George Sheffler of Westmoreland County PA]


[ PART 1 OF 6 ]


I’m gonna try to record uh, a history of my life by request of Marylee Olson.
Uh, the only things that I'm gonna leave out is the things that uh, I uh, don’t care to remember myself. I don’t talk about em.


And I’ll try and make this a pleasant recording. (Shut her off). Don’t check any of these dates, because uh, they may be as much as 6 months discrepancy and uh, at my age at this time, uh, a month seemed like years sometimes. So therefore they may be some discrepancies but I will do the best I can according to my memory, period. (Shut her off)


I was born in 1892 at a place- near a place- called, uh, Carlton Michigan in Monroe County. I don’t remember the exact spot although I have seen it. (Shut her off)


Uh, after I was born about 6 months I was dressed up real fancy taken to Monroe Michigan, had a picture taken… uh, which I still have, and uh, I will leave it with this recording.


Shortly after this picture was taken, my mother and father, for reasons known to them the best, left Michigan for uh, Indiana. They had a team of horses, a flat bottom, uh, light wagon with a spring seat, no covering. And it must have been in the fall of the year, from the report I got from my mother. And it must have been one horrible trip.


When we arrived in Indiana, we were not too well received according to the reports that I got.
And uh, my father had to work here and there, and they had a very very hard time of it.


Then, they went back to Michigan when the sawmills opened up in the fall of the year.
And I growed up that way, going back and forth, summer and in the winter between Michigan and Indiana as the work opened up, in the winter in the sawmills, summer on the farm. (shut her off Carl)


The reason for the shortage of work in the various places was this was at the time of the great panic of McKinley’s time. (shut her off)


Along in the latter part of this, uh, time in my growing up, uh, my mother inherited a uh, small amount of money from her mother, who died at her birth, and it was in trust with my Grampa Sheffler.


And the first I can remember, they had started- or they had bought- 2 acres of land near Carlton Michigan and had started a new home. The home was nearly completed before I could remember anything. And as it was being completed, they had a housewarming with a big barn dance and I remember that distinctly.


It wasn’t only just a short time after that, that I had started to school. My first school days were spent there. I got almost to school and came back home. And I was promptly warmed on the rear end and started back to school. And I almost got to school that time. But I went back home. So mom took me to school. Period.


I don’t remember, uh, how long I had went to school here, but my mother’s and father’s first parting happened along about this time. I and my father went to Indiana - I don’t know how and I don’t know what year it was. Uh, but at least we went to Indiana and then I went to Indiana at school one half a term I think. I’m not sure about that.


And then my father went back to Michigan with my mother and I stayed with my grandparents for a time. And later on they sent me by train back to Michigan.


We went to Ford City near Wyandotte. My father went to work at the Arm and Hammer Sody Works in Ford City. There, I don’t remember of going to school. I don’t think that their uh, relationship was any too friendly most of the time. And they parted again, I think it was 19-hundred. This was the second parting.


My father had a bicycle. The interurban car went right by our front door. We lived in the company houses. So he and his bicycle and myself got on the interurban, went to Detroit, he bought me a bicycle for 8 dollars, and we started for Indiana on a pair of bicycles.


We went the old Michigan Trail, up through the Irish Hills. [Don’s note: The Irish Hills area is near Sand Lake along Hwy 12 in Lenawee County Michigan. This is a bit more than one third of the way between Detroit and South Bend about 200 miles away. ] Now you can imagine what it was for a young boy that hadn’t had a bicycle and hadn’t been on one for quite some time, to start for South Bend Indiana on a bicycle. Imagine the next day after we’d rode all day, what them legs of mine musta been. What my seater was, boy was it sore. These roads were nothing but gravel and hadn’t had no travel on ‘em except wagons and horses. That’s the kind of road we was riding on.


When we got to the Irish Hills my father had to go take a pair of plyers and go to the wire fence and cut off a strip of wire and fastened it from his seat to the front of my bicycle, to haul me up them hills and he cussed my all the way up. (heh!)


On this trip, uh, you must realize it was long ago and there was no bread in any of the stores, everybody made their own bread. So our food consisted of, uh, crackers and cheese no coldcuts them days they made ring bologna and that’s what we had, ring balogna.


And uh, our sleeping accomodations, our motels and hotels, were farmers’ haystacks and strawstacks if we could find one. Otherwise we slept beside of the road.


One night in particular I remember there was an empty house and uh, we slept on that porch. And I don’t remember how many days we were going from Detroit to South Bend but it was too many, however many it was, for me.

Tuesday, October 05, 2004

George Sheffler, born circa 1779

I need to know some certain things as much as you do, those of you who are reading my words. As time passes, details and records are lost to history.

A few things survive, tax documents, maps, maybe a will or court record. But my own Will and Testament, for instance. Darn if nobody has tracked it down yet. It's not the kind of thing I could find for you now, I'm in no condition to. Someone living will have to conjure up the papers with the details.

Just like paper, my memories also quietly slip into the dusty trunks and the forgotten envelopes that each new generation of grand kids and their families just kind of lose along the way. Not much left, really.

This might help: I died in 1847, in Westmoreland County Pennsylvania, where I lived most of my life, near Greensburg. Just south of it a couple miles. I was a farmer, had a bunch of kids, all boys but one, as I remember it now. I lived there when everyone who lived there needed to be ready to defend each other. It was the far western frontier and people needed to hold it down, first against the French and the Indians long before I was born, and then still the Indians and the British later.

We were in hilly rocky land, hard to farm. But we held on. I'm amazed that the property still sits there undeveloped today, just sitting right there where all my kids were born 200 years ago.

I can't tell you where or when I was born exactly, not now I can't, it's been too long, it's a little faded. Every ten years back then, some local folks came by the property to take the census for the government, but I have to laugh because they never actually asked my birthdate, not that I would have known it.

They just needed to know my name, how many kids under 5, adults over 26, that kind of thing. They need to know who would be available for military service if we got into another fight, and sure enough we did in 1812. But I'll tell about that later.

I just told the census people as well as I could and went on with my day. Later all my kids and grandkids always got their ages wrong too. We always just gave the roundabout number, as it didn't matter much exactly, it was just every so often, not much fuss for us being farmers, really.

You see, I wasn't into dates and ages much. In fact I couldn't read or write either, in any language. My own kind were German, everyone I knew, my family and friends and our Lutheran congregation. We met at the First Lutheran Church in Greensburg on South Main. Not where it is now up a ways on Main, but farther down by 3rd and 4th, where the strip mall and City Hall stand today. Right through my grandkids' baptisms we still had every service in Old German. No reason to change.

The Old German Burial Ground was next to where the church had been. Couldn't tell you if I was buried there, though. About a hundred years after I died, everything was moved out to cemeteries outside of town. If I ever had a headstone there once, it wasn't there anymore, not at least since some people wrote all the names down around 1900.

I might be in the little old burial place just south of our property on the original old Mt Pleasant Road which is Highway 819 now. Central Cemetery was called the Schiebler/Feightner cemetery because it was on my neighbors' property. A couple of my son's boys are buried there. John's sons Leonard and Reuben both died pretty young, before John moved off toward Elderton to make his life as a Blacksmith. We all called Leonard by the name of Levi, that's what we put on his headstone, in German.

We always observed the Sabbath in Old German, and we listed the Baptisms, the Communions, the Confirmations that way too. So when my first son John was christened the scribe wrote into the book "Johannes Schäffler, b. 19 Jan 1802 to Georg Schäffler & Catharina." In our Old German my name is pronounced "Gay Ork" or something close to that but the English speakers all called me George like the Old King.


Spelling, too, that's always been a problem. My name Sheffler was spelled a few different ways in the church records, written by Germans who knew how to spell it the way it sounded, mostly. Like I said I couldn't write it myself, not for my whole life, even when I was old and had to sign for the pension I finally got for the Late War with Britain. I placed an "X" where my counsel told me to.

In church we were Schäffler, Scheffler, and Shaeffler early on. But English speakers mostly wrote "Sheffler" so that's what the grandkids all went by.

Next time I write I'll tell you more about my days in the Late Great War with Britain, you know it as the War of 1812 but no one ever called it that much in my day.


George Sheffler, Greensburg, Pennsylvania