Finding Phillip Shaffner
My initial research into my mother’s ancestry ended with our great-great-grandfather, Phillip Shaffner, who died in 1920. His burial, as well as that of his wife, Maria Alleman, was listed on the Steelstown EC Church cemetery survey, which I found posted online by Marian Snyder. I visited the cemetery and transcribed his birth and death dates from his gravestone.
Then I went to the offices of the Lebanon Daily News, searched through the microfilm archives, and found his obituary. The Daily News staff was very gracious to allow me to search their archives, but they are not generally accessible to the public. Instead, the archives are available at the Lebanon County Historical Society. However, Phillip’s obituary did not name his parents or say where he was born. The only clue it contained was that he was survived by a sister, Barbara Ulrich.
I did more searches on the Internet. I could find no reference to our Phillip Shaffner (forwards and backwards, with other variations of the spelling) or our Barbara Ulrich. I found a web site which listed the 1830 census of Annville Township, but there were no Shaffners. Another web site had the heads-of-household, but not other family members, from the 1850 census of East Hanover Twp, which named a Frederick Shafner. Still another web site had the 1850 census of North Annville Twp, but the only Shaffner which appeared there was a John Shafner.
In an unrelated matter, I had asked my mother to visit the Ono Cemetery. She told me that, while there, she saw the gravestone of a Peter Shaffner (1855 – 1912). I found several web sites which mentioned Shaffners in Lebanon and Dauphin Counties, including a Frederick and a Peter, but none of them shed any light on the parents of Phillip, or on the relationship, if any, between Phillip, Frederick, John, and Peter.
A few notes about old census records: Before 1850, the census recorded only the name of the head of household, and then the number of people living there, categorized by age, etc. Beginning with the 1850 census, the names and ages of all persons living in the household were also recorded. Although their relationship could be implied from the names and ages, it could also be misleading. For example, a niece or nephew, or even a younger sibling, living in the house could be mistaken for a child of the head of household. Beginning with the 1880 census, each person’s relationship to the head of household was also recorded.
However, that does not mean that their precise relationship to each other can be definitely deduced, i.e. stepchildren and half-siblings. And they would not include children who were deceased or had already moved out or were living with other relatives or were live-in employees somewhere else (or were not yet born!). As a result, when census records provide the basis of genealogy data, they often contain the wife’s first name only (not her maiden name), estimated birth years, and incomplete lists of children.
My search for Phillip’s parents seemed to be at a dead end. Several months later I was browsing the message boards on Ancestry.com, when I read a message from someone who seemed to know something about the Shaffners in Dauphin County. It then occurred to me that East Hanover Twp was originally part of Dauphin County before it was split into Lebanon County. So I enlisted the help of another researcher, who graciously searched the 1880 census for all the Ulrichs with a wife named Barbara. One of them, which seemed to be about the right age, was Solomon Ulrich, living in Swatara Twp, Dauphin County.
That was the break I needed. A new search for Solomon Ulrich turned up a transcription from the 1896 Commemorative Biographical Encyclopedia of Dauphin County of a profile of Samuel Nisley. His wife, Maria Shaffner, daughter of Frederick Shaffner and Catherine Deibler, had a sister, Barbara, who was married to Solomon Ulrich, and a brother, Philip, who was married to Mariah Alleman. The article contains other information about the Shaffner family, including a mention of the brother, Martin, who was “killed in the army”. Incidentally, this web page did not appear in my original searches because the first and last names (Phillip + Shaffner and Barbara + Ulrich) do not appear together on the page.
My next search for Frederick Shaffner turned up a message from another researcher, who had transcribed information from Kelker’s 1907 History of Dauphin County that stated that Frederick Shaffner, married to Catherine Deibler, was the son of Martin Shaffner and Feronica Haldeman. The message contained other information about the Deibler family as well. From there I was able to make the connection with the Halterman Family website, which contained a full page history of the family of Martin and Feronica Shaffner. I had seen that page months before when I had done a general search for Shaffner + Lebanon, but at the time I had no way to know that one of the sons named in the article was Phillip’s father. Another website by Anne Frysinger Shifflet, contained a detailed genealogy of Hiram Schaffner, who was a nephew of Phillip. This same series of discoveries led me to write the article about Phillip’s younger brother, Martin Shaffner, who fought at Gettysburg and was later killed in the Civil War. When I visited the Ebenezer cemetery and located Frederick’s plot, I was pleased to find Martin’s grave as well.
As my research became more and more engrossing, I made the decision to subscribe to Ancestry.com to access the US censuses myself. The US Census, in enhanced, indexed form, is available from the two main genealogy websites. It is an expensive subscription for the casual user, but an invaluable resource for the serious researcher. I also joined the Lebanon County Historical Society, where I have since spent countless hours in front of the microfilm reader searching for marriage licenses and obituaries. There I found a few other genealogy books related to our family. The most important was Shifflet’s book, Pennsylvania German Ancestors, which contains a full chapter about our Schaffner relatives. Eventually I was able to put all of the pieces together, as the John Shafner mentioned above was Phillip’s older brother, and Peter Schaffner was Phillip’s oldest son.
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