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