The Legacies of Jacob and Susannah Walters Mauk

Their Beginnings

Jacob and Susannah, people of German descent, were born (1792 and 1798, respectively), raised and married (approximately 1815) in Bedford County, Pennsylvania. They relocated to Jefferson County during the middle 1830s, at a time when many German-speaking families made similar decisions to move westward seeking land on which to build their futures. They are known to have had children with them when coming to Oliver Township in Jefferson County. Eventually, they had a total of seventeen children, only one of whom died as a young child. The others all married and added children to the family tree. In the context of local family history research, the Mauks are typical: the man was a farmer and the family was one of the many families of German ancestry which settled in the townships surrounding Punxsutawney and the children were numerous. These factors alone make the Mauk family worthy of study. Investigation reveals many threads to their story.

Their Genealogy

Their Genealogy A Mauk descendant, JoAnne Mottern Shively became interested in genealogy as a high school student in the 1960s. She pursued this interest into adulthood as a member of Punxsutawney Area Historical & Genealogical Society and quickly began to build an extensive family tree with the aid of specialized genealogy software for computers. She was meticulous in seeking documentation for each entry into her database and became interested in the entire subset of descendants of Jacob and Susannah. She put this material on line for family members, worked with other researchers and created an expanded database with extended family connections, eventually including information for many local families. Since JoAnne’s death in 2017, her genealogical work has been taken up by Donald Sigwalt, president of the Mauk Family Reunion Committee. He sees to the updating of the family database and has moved into the latest tool of genealogical research, DNA testing.

Their Final Resting Places

Many members of the Mauk extended family, over several generations, lie in the Old Ebenezer Cemetery, west of Punxsutawey and just off Route 536 in Oliver Township. Of course, as marriages and relocations took place, many were buried in cemeteries near and far. Nearby, Mauk descendants can be found at St. John’s, Grange and Perry cemeteries. Interestingly, Susannah, who died in 1854, was buried without a headstone at St. John’s as Ebenezer Church and Cemetery did not yet exist. Two young grandchildren were buried there as well for the same reason. Jacob died in 1866 and was buried at Ebenezer. His monument includes Susannah’s name. In reviewing the Ebenezer listings in “Tombstone Hoppin’,” compiled in 1980 by Patricia Steele and a team of volunteers, the earliest dated Ebenezer monument is that of Rheuben Shafer, young son of S. and S. Shafer, who died June 5, 1862, at the age of 4 years, 26 days. Nearly all older cemeteries have stones which are now unreadable or even missing so that definitive first interments are difficult to document.

Their Connection to the Land

Records reveal that Jacob Mauk took up land in that area of Jefferson County where Oliver, Perry and Ringgold Townships border one another. In the 1830s, only Perry Township, settled in 1809, had yet been legally established (1817 according to McKnight, 1818 according to Scott); Ringgold and Oliver Townships, though settled in 1818 and 1822 respectively, would not be drawn from Perry until 1848 and 1851. In his compilation of local Caylor history, D.P. Caylor notes that, “Isaac Mauk owned most all of the land … which contained quite a few hundred acres; the last owner of the Lyman Mauk farm was Merle Coleman.” Various land records note that the Ebenezer Church and Cemetery were set on land owned by Coleman. Nearby property owner, Bill Vallies, whose land was known to have been owned by Coleman, was preparing his field for the planting of Christmas trees in 2017 when he unearthed a very large fieldstone. His son, Brent, was there to snap a photograph. Bill pushed the stone to the side where it rested until 2019, little thinking what would become of it.

Their Faith

When early German-speaking peoples settled in Jefferson County, they often established churches that were shared by more than one denomination. As noted in early histories of the county, “Prior to 1853, the old German Reformed and Lutheran branches of the church (in Punxsutawney) worshipped together in harmony, agreeing to disagree on the doctrinal points which distinguished them.” Union churches outside of town followed the same pattern. “But in that same year came Rev. Mr. Brandt, a strict disciplinarian, who insisted on exact conformity with the Lutheran creed. This caused a disjunction, the Lutherans withdrawing and building a church of their own.” A similar split occurred in the Paradise area, “resulting in two churches close enough for intermarried couples to park a buggy at one church and walk to the second.” County histories do not have much to say about the St. John’s Church in Perry Township on the south side of Route 536 or the Ebenezer Church diagonally across the road in Oliver Township. There is an Ebenezer Church mentioned in the county histories but the details described match another Ebenezer Church which once existed in the northern part of the county. St. John’s congregation formed in 1835 and was known as a “Reformed Lutheran” congregation. The 1866 Pomeroy map of Jefferson County has a segment for Perry and Oliver Townships which indicates two churches nearby one another, not by name but by denomination. The church and cemetery on the south side of what would later become Route 536 is described as “Lutheran.” The church diagonally across the road is described as “Albright.” Albright churches were established by followers of Jacob Albright (1759-1808), a Lutheran who, at one point in his life, experienced a personal crisis which his Lutheran faith could not assuage. He was drawn to the camp meetings of Methodism, found solace there and began to build a following. During his lifetime, the churches of his followers were known as Albright churches; but, in 1816, they began to formally use the name “Evangelical Association.” Nevertheless, Albright as a denomination must have stayed in the minds of Jefferson County residents for it to appear on the 1866 Pomeroy map. Early deeds pertaining to Ebenezer refer to it as a part of the Evangelical Association. Briefly stated, later consolidations led to the Evangelical United Brethren and, eventually, to what is now the United Methodist denomination. Tradition has it that Ebenezer was formed by persons who had once been members of St. John’s. The year is not known at present. What is known is that in 1848, St. John’s congregation built the frame structure it now uses, leaving the log building it had been using for worship to be used as a school. At least one account for Ebenezer indicates that its congregation had been worshipping in a log schoolhouse prior to building the frame structure it later occupied. It seems plausible that the schoolhouse references are one and the same. The twentieth century brought many changes to both churches; the mergers within Methodism described above, which affected Ebenezer, were matched by changes at St. John’s. At some point, St. John’s became simply “Reformed,” (a 1895 history of reformed churches in the area described St. John’s as a union church but with no Lutheran organization in practice) merging nationally in 1934 with the Evangelical Synod of North America to form the Evangelical and Reformed Church (not the same Evangelical as mentioned earlier) and, in 1957, with the Congregational Christian Church (itself a merger of two denominations) to form the United Church of Christ. In 2006, the St. John’s congregation voted to become independent and has adopted the “Reformed” designation. In the meantime, Ebenezer membership had begun to decline in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Those who attended as children then believe the church was forced to close around 1945 or 1946. This is reasonable as the Old Ebenezer Cemetery Association was incorporated as a separate entity in 1949 and took title to the land where church and cemetery were located from the Evangelical Conference of Pittsburgh. Though the cemetery association no longer has the support of a church to maintain cemetery grounds, the Mauk Family Reunion Committee does provide support through contributions and fundraising projects. The church and its contents were sold by auction in 1975, the church salvaged for materials. Don Adams, whose twelve-year-old brother, Cleyo, was killed in a tractor accident in 1953, remembers his funeral and being inside the unused church building. Never having been electrified, the church sanctuary had a gas chandelier; he remembers a shelf holding a quantity of small hand lanterns or lamps. He also remembers another shelf stacked with wooden shakes; they had handles attached and paper glued to them with hymns and other worship aids, some recognizable, others not, possibly in German.

Their Connection to Community

A community can be described as people with common characteristics, history or interests living in an area (or the area itself) or persons having common or professional interests scattered throughout a larger area. Both definitions can be applied to the 2019 Old Ebenezer Cemetery project. It’s been neighbors helping neighbors and a chain of men and their machines who know one another well. Learning that the reunion committee hoped to install a fieldstone at the Ebenezer Cemetery, Bill Vallies (Sprankle Mills) offered for use the stone he had unearthed in 2017, loaded it on his steel sled and dragged and pushed it with heavy equipment through his fields to the Mauk Tunnel Road with the intention of hauling it to the cemetery site up the hill. That plan proved to be unworkable as the ground was too soft to drag the stone off-road up the hill and the stone was too heavy to drag it up Mauk Tunnel Road and St. John Road without risking damage to the roadways. A week later, Carl Cook (Five Points) arrived with his pullback recovery truck; the stone and sled were winched on board and, in a matter of minutes, hauled up to the cemetery site followed by a convoy of Mauk committee members’ vehicles. Waiting at the site was Doug Craven (Hamilton) who had dug the hole where the stone could be placed in a vertical position. Craven handled that work with his track hoe and the assistance of Vallies and committee members, bracing the stone overnight with the track hoe. Craven estimated that the stone approximated ten tons in weight. The next day, Vallies pushed soil around the stone, tamping it down later with a mechanical tamper. Subsequently, he power washed the stone, and Don Adams (Pheasant Hollow) did some needed sandblasting, revealing the stone’s beautiful and varied colors. The reddish-browns are due to iron content which surfaced ages ago when moisture within the stone, from the time when the land was underwater, evaporated. Stone-carving artist, Everett Botelho (New Bethlehem), recreated the image, from a photograph, of the Ebenezer Church in its later days. The iron content made carving the cemetery name directly into the stone impractical, so he provided a granite slab which shows his crisp, precise lettering to advantage.

Their Reunions

Mauks began to hold family reunions as early as 1897, the first held at the Isaac Mauk homestead in Oliver Township. Later reunions were held at the Ebenezer Church. For some years now, the reunion has become a two-day affair. The fourth Saturday of August is devoted to a genealogy workshop. Here, family members bring their laptops and tablets and get advice on how to access the family website and other online resources. Instruction is also provided to enable all family members to participate in the ongoing DNA project. Don Sigwalt also provides brief programs on various aspects of the family, such as military service during wartime, members who have passed away and new connections found. Saturday evening, those who wish eat together at a local restaurant. Sunday provides time for everyone to get together to take pictures, exchange information, visit cemeteries and hold the reunion committee’s annual meeting. Persons wishing to communicate with the Mauk Reunion Committee can do so by emailing Mauk.reunion@gmail.com

Their Military Service

For the 2016 reunion, Sigwalt described what was happening with the family during the Civil War. This included a detailed summary of family members as they appeared in 1860 Census records and specifics about fourteen men of the extended family who served. Of those fourteen men, Joseph Reed, Jacob Mauk and David Smith lost their lives, two others, Boaz Blose and John Kinter, each served two enlistments. Individually, they served with the 105th, 135th, 148th, 82nd, 78th, 206th and 74th PA Volunteers, 57th PA Militia and 2nd Battalion Militia Infantry. Two additional men drafted at war’s end were discharged. At the 2018 reunion, the Saturday workshop focused on service during WWI. Research into military records uncovered 53 WWI servicemen, 30 of whom served overseas. Frank Bowman and Oral Kunselman, both of Punxsutawney, are noted as having been wounded. Two men, Neigh Carrier and Ezra Thompson, were registered for the draft late in the war but succumbed to “influenza pneumonia” before there were able to serve. A third man, Lester L. Mohney, was killed in 1917, just one week after he had registered for the draft. According to newspaper reporting, Mohney, twenty-two-year-old son of J.W. Mohney of Grange, was killed in Michigan when a large block of cement fell upon him. Brought back to Grange, funeral services and interment took place at Ebenezer Church and Cemetery. The Knights of Pythias Lodge of Grange, of which he was a member, attended the funeral in a body. A total of 255 Mauk descendants are known to have registered for the draft. Ebenezer Cemetery, like most others, proudly displays flags at veteran gravesites. These flags are provided by the Veterans’ Administration and are placed in time for Memorial Day each spring. Cemetery Association president, Peggy Brown, maintains a list of flags placed and, of the thirty-three placed for 2019, there are veterans from the Civil War, Spanish-American War, WWI, WWII, Vietnam and periods between. In recent years, the reunion committee has organized recognition graveside ceremonies for Civil War veterans. These include ceremonies at the Grange Church of God Cemetery and the Perry Memorial Cemetery (off the Hamilton-Markton Road between Frostburg and Grange).

Their Livelihoods

WWI draft registrations list the occupations of registrants. Farming and mining accounted for about 25 and 20 percent, respectively. Nearly 10 percent worked for a railroad company in some capacity. The rest listed a variety of occupations which included workmen and professional men of all types, including two ministers. The subject for 2019’s presentation was data drawn from the 1880 Census. Occupations listed for descendants and spouses that year include farmers and farm workers (52%), laborers (17%), carpenters, mill workers and lumbermen (12%), and several domestics, blacksmiths, merchants, teachers and skilled craftsmen.

Their Locales

Two hundred years after Jacob and Susannah married, their known descendants and descendants’ spouses number into the thousands, many of whom have out-migrated great distances. According to census records from 1860, descendants were living in what are now Rose, Knox, McCalmont, Oliver, Perry, Young Beaver and Clover Townships in Jefferson County and Indiana, Canoe and West Mahoning Townships in Indiana County. The 1880 Census shows 240 descendants in Pennsylvania, ten in Michigan*, seventeen in Kansas and three each in Iowa and Wyoming. The WWI draft registrants came from 22 states. Sigwalt notes that although two-thirds lived in Pennsylvania, about 40 lived west of the Mississippi and a handful lived south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Of the Pennsylvania residents, most were living in Jefferson County but the surrounding counties show one or more households. *In the Mauk Family website, there is an entertaining account of Lyman Mauk (1864-1926) traveling to work at Isaac Mauk’s Michigan lumber camp. Many details of his time there are recorded and include the men’s spear-fishing activities. Modern-day descendant Adarsh Khalsa traveled to the reunion this year from Arizona. She grew up in Erie but was curious to learn something about the Mauk Tunnel which runs under the hill on which both Ebenezer and St. John’s are located. She and others visited the cemetery a few days before the reunion where she got a guided tour (by ATV) of the path down to the abandoned tunnel, 1,989 feet in length, constructed in 1910 for the Pittsburg and Shawmut Railroad. This line hauled coal north from Kittanning and nearby communities. Local persons wanting to attend high school in Kittanning rode in the final car nicknamed the “doodlebug.” Khalsa recently compiled a pictorial history, “Mauk Tribe History by Tombstone,” which the reunion committee is using as a fundraiser to support Old Ebenezer Cemetery.

Their Connections to Other Families

When Jacob and Susanna came to Jefferson County, they were part of a larger movement of families of German descent to western Pennsylvania. These may have included Swartz, Mundorf, Dobson, Kuhn/Coon, Nicely/Knisely and Ickes/Eikes families as these surnames are recognizable in Bedford County in the 1830 Census and in Jefferson County after the Mauks arrived. Lingenfelters almost certainly traveled from Bedford to Jefferson at the same time. Over time, marriages took place among these and other families so that connections exist, creating a web of relationships. The reunion committee, following up on their own DNA testing and research, has begun a new and related project, Jefferson County, PA DNA project, to which interested persons can link, submit DNA testing and untangle these intermingled connections. The committee hopes to draw in people who have taken any of the genealogy DNA tests currently available (autosomal, mitochondrial or yDNA) and who have ancestors from Jefferson County. This will include as many descendants of Jacob and Susannah Mauk as can be recruited but also other people with Jefferson County connections.

Their Support of the Punxsutawney Area Historical & Genealogical Society

Beginning with JoAnne Shively, Jacob and Sushanna Mauk researchers have worked closely with PAHGS. They have donated family histories; when a reunion committee fundraiser project includes a book, a copy is donated. This includes the pictorial history compiled this year by Adarsh Khalsa and a 2006 fundraiser cookbook with plenty of interesting recipes, including rhubarb pie. In 2007, the Phyllis Reichenbach Fund was established at PAHGS with donations from reunion committee members which were designated for acquisitions for genealogy reference materials for the Society’s Matthew R. and Anna M. Ayers Tibby Library. Phyllis was the wife of Mauk descendant Ben Reichenbach but was the genealogist of the family. When Phyllis died in 2007, the fund was named in her honor. In addition, a copy of the Mauk family database and computer were provided to PAHGS for use by Society researchers. Sigwalt maintains the original of this database and updates the copy held by the Society as needed. Officers and members of the Mauk Family Reunion Committee and the Old Ebenezer Cemetery Association do what needs to be done to keep the legacies of Jacob and Susannah alive for future generations.

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