New Year’s Day: The Importance of Days
Is there an importance to having New Year’s Day as a significant day in our legacy? It would take hours to sift through Beechroots to find our ancestors that were born exactly on January...
Category: Family
The Heart of the Family
Every family has a heart, and while it isn’t a literal organ—like the one the beats inside us—this heart is an essential, living part of all families. I have been thinking about our family...
Imperfectly Perfect Gifts
One of the many joys of Christmas is the delight that comes from giving and receiving gifts. What child hasn’t wished for some item, written a letter to Santa, or dropped hints to their...
Willoughby G. Hagenbuch: A Rich Life in Spite of Adversity
About a month ago, I saw a piece of Hagenbuch history for sale on eBay. It was a postcard sent on August 4, 1967 by Willie Hagenbuch of Bowmanstown, Pennsylvania to Félix Duval of...
Giving Care to Our Ill Relatives
As you know, I am now on hospice care due to the advancement of prostate cancer. I was still hoping to buy more time; but two weeks ago, after my wife Linda, my oncologist,...
The Stories Go On and On and On
The scenarios could have been very different over the past 50 plus years. I may have had no interest in our Hagenbuch family’s history. Uncle Perce may have never latched on to me as...
Dr. Elmer J. Hagenbaugh: Library Thief, Physician, and Convict
On January 30, 1890, 26-year-old Elmer J. Hagenbaugh was arrested in Los Gatos, California. He was charged with grand larceny and accused of stealing $206 of books (around $7,000 today) from the State Library...
Dowager Julia A. (Landbach) Hagenbuch
If you have ever watched a Marx Brothers’ film, then you are probably familiar with the character of the dowager—a wealthy widow. In many of the Marx Brothers’ films, the dowager was portrayed by...
There’s More to the Story
Our Hagenbuch genealogy remains a work in progress. Look back at this site’s earliest articles and you will likely find an inconsistent detail or unfinished story. When my father, Mark, and I first began...
Taufscheine for Norman Hagenbuch and Maggie Linsenbigler
A few weeks ago, I was leafing through a book my father, Mark, had given to me: To These Parents: A Compendium of Pennsylvania German Taufscheine, Volume One. One Taufschein—a birth and baptism document—caught...
