The Welty Family

A bit of upkeep, not a discovery: the site moved to free, static hosting served straight from its open-source repository, so it can’t be paused or walled off and every version is preserved in public. The research doesn’t change — this just makes sure the record stays reachable, for good.

The depreciation-pay roll named a few nights ago has now been read at the page itself, at full zoom. Under the heading “Depreciation Pay,” page 481, three names stand in a row — John, Michael and Philip Welty — each a private drawing back-pay for Revolutionary service. That much is now confirmed beyond the index. What the page does not do is name a county: the printed genealogy that filed these men under the “York County militia” put a label on them the manuscript never carries. So the service stands as first-hand fact, the county tag is set back down as unproven, and the three names sitting together are not assumed to be one household. A clean line between what the record says and what a later book added.

The 1850 and 1860 censuses of Tuscarawas County, Ohio were pulled and read image by image, and they put two families in order. In Dover Township, Jacob Welty (born about 1788) and his wife Christina kept house with a son, Finley — and the same couple, the same Finley, appear together again ten years on. That settles a point the notes had gotten wrong: Finley had been filed under the wrong man; the two censuses running back to back show him plainly as Jacob’s son, and the earlier reading is corrected. A short way off, George Welty (born about 1793) and his wife Susanna sat with their children Sarah, George and John — two of whom the family had carried only as names in old family lore, now found living in their father’s household in the federal count.

Among the many children of Henry Welty and Mary Byerly, two daughters gained proper marriage records this pass. Susan Welty married Walter Carr in Stark County, Ohio, in March 1843 — a courthouse register line that anchors her to Stark County and quietly confirms that the Welty sisters set out from the same corner of Ohio before turning up, married, in neighboring Indiana towns a migration later. Lucinda Welty’s marriage to Hosea Stockwell in 1846, until now known only from a memorial, was found in the marriage book itself and upgraded to a record. And one hoped-for match — a Welty–Hoopingarner marriage — was searched both directions across the likely years and simply is not there: a clean, useful nothing.

A smaller correction, made in the same spirit. A wife recorded in the tree as Mary Lobengier had been attached to the wrong one of two same-era brothers; this week’s reading moves her to her actual husband, David, and leaves his brother Samuel with the two wives the records really give him. The quiet kind of fix that keeps a growing tree honest.

The morning’s open question — whether the Ruthrauff bride was Michael Welty’s first wife or his second — now has an answer, and it came from four tax returns read one after another at full zoom. Dover Township assessed Michael as a single man in 1779, again in 1780, and again in 1781, each time on the single-men’s list with no land of his own; by 1782 he holds 44 acres on the main roll, and the 1783 septennial count carries him at the same 44. He married Christina Ruthrauff in May 1784. A man taxed as a single freeman into 1781 cannot have married anyone in 1754 — so the old pedigree’s “married Elizabeth, 1754” belongs to a different Michael entirely, and Christina stands as the first wife, not the second. The reversal that yesterday was logged only as a hypothesis is now the plain reading of the record. The same volume gave up one more page: the Pennsylvania Archives’ Revolutionary depreciation-pay roll, where three Welty men — John, Michael and Philip — stand on the one page, each marked “private.” The family’s “Lieutenant” tradition finds no support, but three Weltys drawing a soldier’s back-pay for the Revolution do.

Michael’s son Philip (born 1789) carried the line into Stark County, Ohio, and this pass found where he rests. The usual grave pages would not open all evening — they sat behind a security wall — so the answer came instead from a published book of cemetery inscriptions for Stark County, read through its full text. In the Welty Cemetery in Sugar Creek Township — a small ground on Welty Street, a little over a mile west of the highway — stand the stones of Philip and his wife Sarah, worn past legible dates but named plainly, beside their son Isaac. And a 1916 county history supplied an origin the family had never had in writing: Philip, it says, “fought in the War of 1812, received a grant of land for his services, and located it in Sugar Creek” — very likely the very ground the cemetery still occupies. That account is a century-old secondhand sketch rather than a federal record, so the 1812 service is carried as reported, not proven; but it points a clear way toward the land warrant that would settle it. One more name surfaced on the same page — a Susan Welty, born 1823 — noted and set aside until an original stone or register can say whose daughter she was.

A step sideways from the direct line sits the Gauf family — George Gauf married Philip Jacob’s daughter Elizabeth — and its records had gone stubbornly quiet: search after search for the elder Philip Gauf’s 1777 will returned nothing. This pass found why. In three York County deeds the family is written “Philip Gauff, by the name of Philip Kauff” — an alias no index search under “Gauf” would ever surface. With the right spelling the deeds opened: one recites a son’s will — “Philip the younger,” holder of the 213-acre home plantation — leaving a yearly annuity “unto my mother Christina, as my father’s will says,” which fixes him firmly as the elder man’s son. The elder’s own will is still not among the digitized books, so the question that began the hunt — does it name a son George? — waits on the will book itself; but a family that kept slipping out of the record now has a second name to be searched under.

Christina Welty’s mother was Barbara Ruthrauff of Newberry Township, and her estate came up for settlement in 1802. The hope going in was that Michael Welty might appear on it — as administrator or bondsman — which would have been the first legal document to tie him directly to his wife’s family. The record was pulled and read: administration went to a Jacob Miller, and no Welty appears anywhere on the account. It is a negative, but a clean and useful one — it corroborates the Ruthrauff parentage the church register already gave, and it closes a door so no one need open it again. Who Jacob Miller was to the Ruthrauffs is a new small question, set down for later.

Further back, at the immigrant generation, John Jacob Welty’s wife is given across the internet three different maiden names — Broff, Braff, and “Bruss of Solingen,” the last stated with confident detail: a christening at Wald, near Solingen, in 1730. Run to ground, the whole structure rests on a single index card attached to a family tree in 2014 — a bare first-name-and-date match to an unrelated German infant, with no record of any kind connecting her to Pennsylvania. A sweep of the ship lists and the local church books turned up no Broff, Braff or Bruss family at all. The name the family has carried, in other words, is unproven, and the tidy “Solingen” origin is a modern invention rather than a record. What her name truly was remains open — the likeliest real candidate is an anglicized misreading of a common Lancaster surname — and it is filed just so, precisely so no one builds further on sand.

A small confirmation to close the night’s records. The date of Michael Welty’s death — narrowed a few days ago to “on or before 7 September 1815,” against the pedigree’s unsupported “9 September” — was this time checked against the manuscript itself: the Ohio appraisers’ book, in the original hand, opening “the goods and property of Michael Weldy, dec’d, Sept 1815.” A court cannot appraise a living man’s estate; the date now rests on the page, not on an index.

And a closing word, since the night’s work is done. Thank you — to the family who have been reading these entries as they appear, following the hunt night after night, and caring about people four and five generations back. Writing the search down in the open only means something because there are people on the other end of it who want to know. Your interest is the reason it is worth doing carefully. More soon.

A Ruthrauff household turned up at the family’s own Dover church: Johannes Rohtrauf and his wife An Maria baptized a daughter at Strayer’s in June 1785, one year after Michael Welty married Christina Ruthrauff — and on the same day as baptisms in the Messerle and Lauer families, three households of the kin web at the font together. Following that thread into the 1925 Ruthrauff family genealogy produced its chapter on the marriage: the Ruthrauff who married Michael Welty of New Philadelphia was, by that book’s account, the only daughter of Johannes Ruthrauff and Anna Barbara (Hoffman) — “wedded without consent.” The book guesses her name as Barbara, but the guess traces to an 1834 deed belonging to a later Michael and his wife Barbara; the 1784 church register supplies the name, Christina. The chapter’s own citation then led to a page image: the 1779 Dover Township tax return, and on its single-men list “Michael Welty” — his earliest known record anywhere — sharing the township with Welty Philip at 100 acres, Welty George at 120 (the acreage family tradition always gave him and no deed ever showed; here he is assessed on exactly it), John Rudrauff at 195, George Gauff at 150, and Daniel Messerly. The whole kin web, one list, five years before the wedding. And a quiet consequence: single in 1779, reportedly still single in 1781, married in 1784 — the old family letters’ claim that the Ruthrauff wife was Michael’s second is likely reversed. If Christina was the first wife, the line of descent this project follows runs through her — and through Johannes Ruthrauff and Anna Barbara Hoffman behind her. That reading is logged as a hypothesis; the 1780–83 returns are queued to test it.

The tax film that yielded the 1771 Manchester list has now given up the next chapter. The Dover provincial tax list warranted 8 December 1774, read at full zoom, contains the entire December-1771 Manchester community — the same Quickels, Rudys, Walks and Wolfs — running in one continuous list under Dover: between 1771 and 1774 the family and its neighbors stayed put, and the township label around them changed. In the W-block: Welty Philip, Welty George — and “Walty Widow.” The John who was assessed beside them in 1771 is gone; John died between 11 December 1771 and 8 December 1774, and a widow now heads the household. She persists: the printed 1780 return carries “Welty, Widow,” with 80 acres, landed on a par with George beside her — a six-year widow household the record had never registered. That she is John’s widow is the natural reading, and it is logged as a hypothesis; who John himself was remains open. The same sweep hardened the edges of the 1771 picture: Dover’s own 1771 list survives only A through O — there is no W-section to hold anyone — and a county-wide read of all seven surviving 1771 township lists found Weld-form taxpayers in Manchester and nowhere else. The 1771 “Welty Paul” was re-read at zoom and stands exactly as written, but the 1774–1780 runs show a Wilt/Wild Paul in his place and no Welty Paul anywhere — the entry is now judged a probable clerk’s slip rather than a fourth Welty household.

The Dover home-church register has now been eye-read across its whole early run, 1745–1786, with surname-blind sweeps over all 174 images. The published extracts the project once leaned on did not survive the comparison: of the twelve Welty entries audited against the typescript, only one stands unchanged — the rest carried swapped columns, grafted dates, a child recorded as a wife, sponsors promoted to parents — each now corrected against the page. The page that refused to render two nights ago finally rendered, and its “Georg Gauf & Elisabet” proved to be the known 1782 baptism itself — the daughter whose sponsor was Christina Welty — not an earlier child. With that page read and every candidate venue now searched, the working hypothesis is that the 1782 child was the couple’s firstborn. The elder Gauf household also gave up its children — seven baptisms, 1750–1764, among them Magdalena (1753), the future wife of the orphans’ guardian Jacob Lauer — and no Georg among them, which keeps George’s parentage a hypothesis for the queued will-pull to decide. Oldest of all: the union-church covenant of 30 May 1757, by which the Reformed and Lutheran members agreed to share the land and churchyard — and the first signature on it is Görg Weldy, with Philliph Gauff and Daniel Messerly signing the same page: the earliest church act by anyone of the name in Dover, years before the families intermarried.

A negative worth keeping. The hope that Philip Jacob’s blank years (1754–1771) might surface in French & Indian War supply paper — the army contracted York County wagons in 1758 — has been run to the end of print: all nineteen transcript volumes of the Bouquet papers plus the letterpress edition, swept surname-blind, hold no Welty under any spelling, and the contracting letters name the contractors, never the wagoners — the wagoner name-rolls were simply never printed. The one record series that could still cover those years, the provincial rent rolls (three York County volumes, roughly 1749–1776), exists only on paper in Harrisburg — queued for a reading room, not a browser.

A side session that ran without access to the research log came back with three “new” leads. Checked against the log, two were old acquaintances — one a question answered in full last week, the other a bounty-land warrant already pulled and shown to belong to another man entirely. The method note is filed: memory lives in the log, and leads get checked before they get chased. The third lead survives review, and it is a good one: an Ohio county history reports a “Welty Church” (United Brethren) with its own burying ground in Sugar Creek Township, Stark County — squarely in the orbit of Michael’s son Philip (b. 1789), whose son Isaac lies in the Welty Cemetery at Brewster. Whether Philip himself is buried on that ground is now on the hunt list.

Last night’s suspect for the origin of “married Elizabeth, 1754” has been checked against the manuscript. The marriage is real, and it sits in the same Edenkoben Reformed register series that holds the family’s own baptisms: on 9 January 1754 the pastor married Philipp Jacob Doll to Maria Elisabetha, daughter of Lorentz Neu. The entry was read at full zoom, and the groom’s surname is unambiguous. Just as telling is where the 1754 date doesn’t appear: a sweep of the public trees and databases found it nowhere — the one public tree that names the wife offers a different, equally uncited guess (“about 1751”). The date survives in exactly one private pedigree, and the question for its keeper is now sharp: does a record stand behind it, or an Edenkoben index hit that belongs to another man?

The 1754 marriage got a brute-force search: every published or indexed Pennsylvania register that could cover August 1750 through 1757 was swept surname-blind — every Philip married to every Elisabeth, some 330 index rows, plus full-text reads of the major printed sets and a line-by-line read of the First Reformed Lancaster register. Fourteen candidate couples emerged; none is ours. The surviving registers have holes right at the window — First Reformed Lancaster’s marriage book starts only in 1752, Chester’s early records are lost, Philadelphia has a gap — so the marriage was likely never recorded, or sits in a book that no longer exists. The sweep did surface one suspect for the tradition itself: an Edenkoben marriage of 9 January 1754 — Philipp Jacob Doll to Maria Elisabetha Neu — just the hit a pedigree-builder searching Edenkoben indexes for “Philip Jacob” would find. Our Philip Jacob had been in Pennsylvania since 1750, so it cannot be his, but it is the likely source of the uncited “married Elizabeth, 1754.” One lead survives the negative: a “Jacob Weld” naturalized in Lancaster County in 1761, which under the law of the day required seven years’ residence and a church’s sacramental certificate.

The Elizabeth (Welty) Gauf story gained its last chapter. The Quarter Sessions docket shows that in the same March 1792 court cycle as the guardianship petition, the widow Catharine Gauff was indicted for assault and bound to good behavior toward Elizabeth Gauff, the nine-year-old orphan; witnesses included the court-appointed guardian and Peter Messerle, the child’s uncle by a Welty marriage. Catharine pleaded guilty and was fined five shillings — and her treatment of the child is the likely reason the family went to court. The guardian, Jacob Lauer, had married a Gauff daughter in 1779, making him the orphans’ uncle by marriage. A generation up, Philip Gauf of Dover died testate in 1776/77, his estate handled by Daniel Messerle (Peter’s father), so the Gauf–Messerle bond predates every Welty marriage in the cluster; George fits as his of-age elder son, though that will-pull is queued and the reading stays a hypothesis. The hunt for Elizabeth’s burial closed without a stone: no York-town church kept burial registers across 1783–1790 — Trinity’s book has an eighty-one-year gap in that record class, Christ Lutheran’s earliest burials are three entries from 1801, and county cemetery indexes hold no early Gauf stones. Her burial is unrecoverable; her death window — after November 1782, before about 1790 — rests on the court reconstruction alone. The same night opened two doors: the Strayer’s register shows Jacob Lauer and his Gauff wife baptizing at that Dover church in 1786, and its 1777–1786 pages carry “Georg Gauf & Elisabet” as a couple — parents or sponsors, the page images wouldn’t render to say.

Last week’s two baptisms at Quickel’s church in Michael and Christina’s “silent years” — Catharina (March 1785) and Johannes (March 1786) — had been logged as children who died young, since neither appears in the estate papers. A re-analysis makes a tidier claim: they are likely the first two children on the family’s heirloom chart — Catherine (1785–1863), who married a Forney, and John (1786–1827), who married Hannah Aultman. The birth years match exactly; the chronology leaves no room for same-name doubles (Michael and Christina married in May 1784); and the pair’s absence from the estate records was already explained — John died the year before the land was partitioned, and Catherine appears to have been bought out rather than deeded land. It is logged as a hypothesis, and the tree stays unchanged until the merge is decided. (A bonus from the same pass: the chart’s daughter who “married a Harney” may be the same hard-to-read surname as Barney/Forney — possibly the same Catherine, written twice.)

That Manheim Township man supplied the day’s caution. His estate account — a substantial £1,532 — was settled by an executor “according to the said deceased’s Will,” contradicting an earlier finding that no John Welty will existed in the York index. A full-text search turned up the will in minutes: John Welty Sr. of Manheim, written 21 September 1793, naming his wife Eve and a dozen children — the entire elder generation of the Swiss-line family, in one document. None connect to the Edenkoben line, but the lesson holds: an index sweep can miss what the record plainly contains, and every “no such record” in the log now carries that caveat.

From the Trinity York register browse: baptisms to a “Jacob Welty & Anna Maria” — Johannes (1784), Johann Peter (1786), Henrich (1787), and, from an earlier read, Abraham (1791). Cross-checked against the 1826 estate petition listing the Manchester patriarch’s surviving heirs, the fit is clean: John and Henry appear as heirs with matching birth years, while Peter and Abraham are absent — both died young. One flag: a second Jacob-and-Anna-Maria couple married in the same church in 1785, so the identification is corroborated rather than closed.

The date every tree carries for Michael Welty’s death — 9 September 1815 — traces to one source: the same pedigree line whose marriage date the church register already disproved. Against it, the court recorded that administration of his estate opened 7 September 1815, and an estate cannot open before its owner dies. The family record now reads: Michael died on or before 7 September 1815. A small correction, made before the wrong date could fossilize further.

The same regimental pages held a hard story. At Antietam, on 17 September 1862, the colors of the 11th Pennsylvania were handed to William Welty of Company C, a Weltytown grandson, “who was killed a few minutes after it was put into his hands.” The flag passed to Frederick Welty of the same company, who was wounded and left it on the field. The roster confirms it: W. B. Welty, killed at Antietam Sept. 17, 1862 — dating a death the family record had left open.

With the first six generations standing on records, the project’s new goal is set: carry every line of the Edenkoben family — daughters’ lines included — complete through the seventh generation, each person resting on at least one independent record and every legend either upgraded or fenced. A scoreboard now tracks a children-search for every person in the first six generations. The tree crossed 298 people today.

The brother-candidate line got its paperwork upgraded at the source. The federal land office’s database confirms Jacob Welday Sr.’s Ohio patent — issued 10 August 1813 for the quarter-section at Cross Creek his family had entered under the old credit act — with son John patenting the adjacent quarter of the same section eight years later. A spelling-variant sweep found three of his sons as Ohio patentees. The Welday memorials confirm that Jacob Sr.’s own grave was lost to strip-mining; the oldest Welday stone belongs to his son. One memorial adds an independent source for his wife’s name (Mary Rubel), and another gives son Abraham a birthplace — Milford Township, Somerset County — exactly where Jacob Sr. and Michael sat side by side on the 1796 tax roll. A widely-copied online tree that grafts this branch onto the Manchester family is contradicted by the DNA and logged as a decoy. What would settle brother-or-cousin to Michael is a deeper Y-DNA test on a Welday-line volunteer.

The middle Dover daughter’s family firmed up. Peter Messerle, who married Christina Welty at Trinity York in 1784, has his own Dover baptism — 1760, son of Daniel Messerle — making the couple a local match, and two of their children (Magdalene, 1785, and John, 1793) joined the tree from the Strayer’s register. The same sessions opened the record hunt on her sister’s Gauf household and surfaced the 1803 “Elizabeth Gauff” marriage whose meaning — daughter, not widow — the Orphans’ Court work would settle two days later. All of it still rides, clearly flagged, on whether these Trinity brides were Philip Jacob’s daughters.

A long pass through the public family trees sorted every rival spelling of the name once and for all, and none of them is our Edenkoben line. Welti is Swiss; Welte is a separate German family; Wälti / Walti is entirely Canton Bern — the Emmental cradle of the unrelated Swiss branch; Welde is mostly sixteenth-century Norwich in England, with a distinct Baden family behind the rest; and Weldy is itself three unrelated families, one of them carrying a grafted “born 1614 in Switzerland” ancestor. The result is reassuring: the surname noise that has bred look-alike ancestors for years is now charted, so a stray “Welti” or “Weldy” in a record no longer has to be argued from scratch. One more origin tale — a “Peter Welty, Mennonite settler of 1727” — went into the myth ledger as belonging to none of our lines.

Some widely-shared online trees (on Geni and WikiTree) list a different father for our Michael Welty — John Jacob Welty, of the immigrant uncle’s line, rather than Philip Jacob. That rung is an easy place for trees to differ, so it’s worth setting gently alongside the family’s own papers. Those trees pair John Jacob with a wife, Christina Braff, married in 1757 — and a hand-copied Welty family register, kept in the first person, records that same couple: John Jacob Welty and Christina Broff, married 28 March 1757, followed by their children as they arrived — Ann Elizabeth (January 1758), John (April 1760), Christina (May 1762), and on. Michael isn’t among them, and the dates make it hard to fit him in: a couple who married in the spring of 1757, with their first child in January 1758, are unlikely to be the parents of a Michael already born around 1757. So the record leans back toward the Philip Jacob reading, and a Y-DNA test on the direct male line would settle the question for good.

The parentage at Michael’s generation still rests on DNA, and no record naming Philip Jacob’s children turned up this session — but the afternoon found the one documentary path never actually tried. An earlier York County search had come back empty, yet it had only covered administration bonds and partitions; the county’s Orphans’ Court dockets — a separate, image-only series — have never been read for a Welty. That matters because a person’s land could be sold by order of the court, with no will and no administration bond — which is exactly the shape of things here: Philip’s Dover house and two town lots left the family around 1788–1790 with no deed to explain it. If that sale went through the Orphans’ Court, the docket would name Philip Jacob and his heirs outright. A separate check of the published Adams County wills (1745–1800) came back cleanly empty — an honest negative pointing to a family already scattered west — so the docket browse is now the next real step.

One person on the six-generation chart had rested only on the Y-DNA pedigree: Isaac Welty, born 1820. His gravestone at Welty Cemetery in Stark County, Ohio — reading 22 June 1820 – 26 February 1894 — independently names his parents (Philip b. 1789 × Sarah Overholt), his spouse, siblings and children, matching the DNA line exactly and confirming the published 1903 family account. It also settles an old January-versus-June birthdate dispute in favor of June.

On the separate John Jacob Welde (b. 1710) line — the immigrant uncle’s family — the Weltytown / Greensburg thread firmed up. Lewis Welty (b. 1796) gained his wife, Susan Stanabaugh Wannamaker, and a death year of 1871; Daniel Welty (b. 1820) earned an independent gravestone at St. Clair Cemetery, Greensburg, that matches the Y-DNA pedigree exactly and adds a first wife, Mary Ann Drum, the pedigree had never recorded; and a new great-grandchild, Susanna b. 1820, surfaced in a church baptism. The remaining siblings of that generation have no free-record descendants yet — a later census project.

The 1902 obituary of Levi Welty — grandson of Michael, and the man credited with naming Cripple Creek, Colorado — was run down at last: the Rocky Mountain News carried it on 27 December 1902, confirming his age of 77, his survivors, and the Denver-1861 → Monument-ranch → Cripple Creek arc of his life. A cluster of 1868–1877 notices turned up alongside it, showing Levi as a well-known figure around Monument and Divide years before Cripple Creek made his name.

The same full-text move that recovered Michael’s children was pointed at the hypothesized daughters of his father, Philip Jacob of Dover — and it does not transfer, for a reason worth recording. Philip Jacob left no will, and his family had already scattered west before those daughters’ in-law estates arose, so no Welty was ever on hand to appear in the York County records the way Michael’s sons were in Ohio. The only eighteenth-century York-PA Welty records in the full-text corpus are the Dover baptisms already logged. No claim was upgraded here. The honest paths forward are an on-site York County orphans’-court docket search, or DNA from a daughter’s descendant — and the failed shortcut is logged so it isn’t re-run.

Five snapshots from the family’s own papers each carry a thread. Together they give a name for Michael’s burial place — “Crooked Run / Welty’s Graveyard,” matching the 1897 letter’s “Uncle Jake’s farm” — a location for Henry’s grave about ten miles north of Massillon, and a correction that sends Michael Jr. not to Ohio but to Owen / Clay Co., Indiana. Each is now its own line of inquiry.

The internet’s Welty lore was swept into one running ledger, each story paired with the fact that answers it: a Gettysburg “Swedish Welde,” a pair of eighteenth-century immigrant claims that belong to other families, a “Welty’s Mill” whiskey tale, the commercial coat-of-arms sellers, and an Ellis Island story that is really an 1851 arrival. Ten decoys logged with their counter-facts — and, notably, no “three brothers” or stowaway tale exists in any of it; that one appears to be the family’s own.

The Marian Welty Family Archive is now up as its own page — the hand-drawn lineage charts, the 1897 letter, the family registers and record copies, shown as-is with corrections noted beneath each. More of Marian’s collection will be added as it is re-photographed.

Henry’s son David Welty (1831–1924) followed the country west all the way to Escondido, California, where he lies in Oak Hill cemetery. His son Owen L. (“O.L.”) Welty turns out to be the recipient of the treasured 1897 family letter that carries so much of this family’s oral tradition — so we now know exactly who was being written to, and why a copy survived on the California side. Along the way, a widely-copied online memorial that had given David an impossible set of parents was corrected against the record. The Ohio-to-California branch is now traced end to end.

The Conewago (Quickel’s) baptismal register had been the wall behind several questions, its microfilm locked behind a library-only tier. The same register turns out to sit on a second archive, home-viewable — the way around the lock. Beyond Michael’s two children above, it confirmed two sons of the Manchester Philip (Johan Paul, 1794, and Johan Georg, 1797) exactly where an older list had placed them, while three other entries on that list proved absent here and must have been baptized elsewhere. A lead that had sat blocked for weeks is retired.

The Edenkoben register, read directly, dates Georg Wolfgang’s baptism to 29 September 1716 — the entry just below his fixes the month beyond doubt. The “26 August 1716” birth date copied across online trees has no support in the register and is set aside as index-lore. His death year remains the open question.

The sister-pair found earlier at Dover firmed up. Naming custom now points to Philip Jacob as their father: his wife was an Elizabeth and his mother an Anna Catharina, matching daughters Elizabeth and Catharina, whereas George Wolfgang’s known daughters carry an entirely different set of names. It stays a hypothesis — no record yet states the parentage outright — but the three candidate sisters are upgraded from a bare guess to a naming-corroborated set that leans one way.

A full-text sweep of York County records, 1783–1815, turns up John of Dover only as a taxpayer — no will, no estate administration, no orphans’-court file naming a wife or children. The free-record avenue for his family is therefore a closable negative: he is documented as a Dover taxable and by his 1783 marriage, and nothing more is coming from that quarter. What remains are image-only and on-site records.

Until now the Welty daughters were only names in a marriage cluster. A transcription of the Strayer’s / Salem Reformed baptisms at Dover puts two of them in the same records: Christine Welty stands as sponsor at her sister Elizabeth (Welty) Gauf’s child’s baptism in 1782, then marries Peter Messerle in 1784 — an internally consistent sister-pair at the family’s home church, the strongest daughter evidence yet. Which father they belong to — the Edenkoben line’s Philip Jacob, or the Manchester founder, whose household shared the same church — is left deliberately open, and the pair is logged as a hypothesis.

Philip Jacob’s house and two town lots at Dover were traced forward from his last tax returns of 1787–88. By 1789–94 no Welty appears on the Dover rolls, the 1790 census and 1793 county lists show no Welty household or widow there, and the property passed to a non-Welty buyer around 1788–90. The hoped-for first trace of his wife Elizabeth — as a widow holding the lot — does not materialize; that leg is closed negative. His death still brackets to about 1788–90.

Every Edenkoben Reformed marriage from 1739 to Philip’s August 1750 crossing was read entry-by-entry: no Philip Jacob Welde wedding. He married Elizabeth on the Pennsylvania side, ~1751–56 — redirecting the hunt to the German Reformed churches that served fresh Philadelphia arrivals (First Reformed Lancaster, the Goshenhoppen circuit).

The baptism book was read to its last leaf (“FINIS,” 1771): zero further Wäldi or Welde after 1752. That closes the hunt for late-born children of the vanished uncle Hans Philipp Wäldi — he leaves no trace in the register — and means the Edenkoben Reformed baptisms are now 100% swept.

Philip Jacob’s wife — “Elizabeth, m. 1754,” known only from a cousin’s pedigree — got her own research front (six new leads). First sweeps: every published Philadelphia marriage corpus (licenses, Gloria Dei, 1st Reformed) is negative, pointing the wedding to Chester Co.; a Chester in-law sweep found no father’s will but flushed out two flags — a “Weldy” taxpayer who proved to be Welsh (Obedia Wieldy of Haverford, decoy, killed same day) and a keeper: a 1804 Hagerstown MD will naming son-in-law Jacob Weldy — a documented Weldy family at Hagerstown, right where the 1897 letter’s legend put a “brother.”

The flagged “Philip Welty” entries at Bethlehem (1772) and Moore Twp (1781) — the one man who could have rewritten Philip Jacob’s blank years — are a persistent Moore Township farmer (40 ac in 1785, 60 ac in 1786, same neighbors both years, image-read) living there through the exact years Philip Jacob heads the Dover tax rolls. Two simultaneous households, two men: decoy, fenced.

GLO bycatch: a female “Catharine Walta” patented 80 acres in the estate farm’s own section in 1833 (“to HER heirs,” image-verified), with no 1830 household of her own — a fit for Michael’s widow Catharine living in a child’s household and buying land beside her dower third.

Jacob Welday’s 1800 Somerset household holds an unexplained second man 45+ — the first record-grade datum compatible with an aged Philip Jacob having gone west with his sons instead of dying ~1789 in Dover. Killer test: the 1810 follow-through. The same read pushes Jacob’s own birth to before 1755 (the old “b.1759” came from a 1946 query).

A sweep of every federal Rev-War collection finds no Michael and no Jacob Welty among the 13 exact-surname hits — consistent with York Co militia service living outside the federal rolls. The unpublished DAR GRC company roster remains the only known service paper for the pair.

A new cluster: John Welly of Bullskin Twp — adjacent to Donegal, ~10 mi from Michael’s 1797–1807 residence — is a live candidate for brother John of Dover tracking west; Joseph + Peter Welly of Springhill Twp are unsorted.

The Trinity York sibling-set — Elizabeth (×Gauf 1775), Christina (×Messerle 1784), Catharina (×Boehm 1785), plus John’s 1783 Ilgenfritz marriage — is now on the family tree as clearly-flagged hypotheses under Philip Jacob. Two date audits opened alongside: Michael’s “9 Sep 1815” death vs. an administration docket opened 7 Sep, and Philip Jacob’s death bracket now carries the 1800 fork above.

A full-text sweep of PA Archives vol. 21 surfaced a new 1783 Dover tax pairing — “Weldy Phillip 100” adjacent to “Weldy Jacob 100” (and 1781 prints two Philip entries). Fresh support for the farm-partition and brother readings.

The 1925 Ruthrauff book’s claim fails: the complete 1779 Dover tax list has no John Welty — the book misread the adjacent line “Wilte, John.” The real John of Dover (1786–88) is untouched, but 1790 shows two Johns in the future-Adams-Co grouping, and the Adams Weltys trace to Washington Co MD — so the Straban leg is now in doubt.

20 May 1753 turns out to be a Lutheran confirmation day — the Ancestry entries carrying that date as a “baptism” are confirmations of older children, and are now treated as suspect.

The vol. 21 hit-map cleanly separates the lines: a continuous “Welty, Jacob 100” in Manchester Twp 1779–82 (the Manchester I1 branch — George Wolfgang’s Edenkoben descendants), the Manheim Twp cluster of John + Peter verified (the separate Swiss family), and the Dover Weldys (the Edenkoben main line — the same family). The Taneytown/Emmitsburg MD Weltys — Catholic, from Eppingen not Edenkoben — are confirmed a separate family entirely.

All 20 sheets audited: numbering collisions fixed, the ghost 10-May wedding date purged everywhere, four new leads opened (highest-payoff: the New Hanover register test), and the trees regenerated.

“Jacob Welde” and “Geörg Welde,” both self-signed (facsimile-checked), arrived Philadelphia 16 Oct 1752 — now positively identified as the brothers George Wolfgang and John Jacob, who followed Philip across. Philip himself had crossed alone on the Royal Union in 1750 (“Phipps Welde”).

The register holds a tight cluster — likely a sibling set. New sisters surfaced: Christina × Messerle (1784), Catharina × Boehm (1785), plus Johannes × Ilgenfritz (1783).

An unpublished DAR GRC typescript roster (2nd Battalion, York Co., ~1780s) lists both Michael and Jacob Welty in one company — strong brother evidence. Photocopy ordered.

Dover Twp tax lists, 1782: Philip’s 100 acres shrinks to 80, a new adjacent “Jacob 80” appears, alongside Michael’s 44 — the classic signature of a father dividing land among sons.

Levi (1825–1902), a probable grandson of Michael, is credited with naming Cripple Creek. His son Alonzo ran a $100k livery business there.

The founder of Weltytown was John Henry Welty b. 1764 (wife Eva Catherine Stoner) — not our Michael, who is clean-negative in all three Ruff volumes 1782–1820.

The village pastor from 1681 was Johann Jacob Walth — the apex surname is also the pastor’s family. A kinship hypothesis is open.

The separate Swiss (I2b) family’s spine now runs York → Frederick MD (1766) → Rowan NC (1773) → KY → Missouri. All “Swiss origin” grafts onto the German line trace to Bishop Abraham of Dover Twp, Tuscarawas — Michael’s own township. Mystery of the bad grafts: solved.

A new FTDNA match between two living relatives connects the Manchester (I1) branch’s two halves internally, and a living cousin’s Big Y-700 order is confirmed by the project admin.

One of Henry’s sons, Dr. William Welty (1816–1905) of Wyandot County, Ohio, left a biographical sketch in a 1902 county history, and it matches the record at every turn: it names his father Henry and mother Mary Byerly, confirms the move from Fayette County, Pennsylvania to Stark County, Ohio, and repeats the old family count that the immigrant Michael married twice and had “seventeen children in all.” It also writes down the family’s Swiss-origin legend — an ancestor “from the river Aar, near Berne” — which we set aside: the documented origin is the Palatinate at Edenkoben, and the Y-DNA points to a different paternal line than the Bern Weltys the story names. Its value is as a witness that the Swiss tale was already being written into print by 1902.

Subscribed to Archion and found the correct register: Edenkoben Band 2 (Reformed), baptisms 1696–1738 — holding both John Jacob (bp. 1710) and Philip Jacob (bp. 1719).

FindAGrave proves his father William (b. 1816) was a son of Henry & Mary Byerly — making the Hicksville benefactor Henry’s grandson. William’s three pre-1905 children also grave-confirmed.

All ~33 patrilineage pages reviewed: Hans Jacob Waldi (b. ~1691, Edenkoben) named as father of John Jacob b. 1710 — and three different “Philip Jacob Weltys” at Dover cleanly split by haplogroup.

Brian Hamman, admin of the Welty Y-DNA project, confirmed the Edenkoben branch map and sent the STR chart. A living cousin’s Y-67 kit traces to George b. 1823 — the direct line — making his Big Y upgrade the keystone test.