Harshbarger line: Thanking some wonderful folks

I've been overwhelmed this week by two wonderful people who have contacted me and gently corrected some of my genealogy work.  Both of these corrected lines belong to the Harshbarger family, several generations back.

I now have the beginning of some information about Johan Jacob Enck, whom I shall write about in some future post, possibly.  I had the wrong man listed as the father of Anna Catherine Enck.  I have her parents corrected, and now have his parents now, too, and some baptismal records from Germany dating back to 1670.  So cool!   And I am so grateful to Anne Caston! Also, she shows copies of the permission that John Mentz
er received from the Margrave of Baden-Wuerttemburg, to leave for America in 1751.  Those documents are rare, and it is a joy to see them. 

Also Virginia Perry, whom I mentioned in my earlier post about Christopher Kitterman, wrote to clarify the wonderful work she's done.  What I didn't understand, and what confused me immensely as I was writing my original post, was that there were two different men by the same name.  She has done an enormous amount of research to clarify which Christopher was which, and she generously shared some of her conclusions with me.  I will either write a separate post or update the post I already wrote, so that my misunderstandings don't clutter up the two different lines, hopefully.

The collaboration and generosity of these two women exemplify the best of genealogy.  No one would ever know more than a few generations of their family history if everyone had to start from square one, and walk the complete journey by themselves.  In the case of genealogy, it truly takes everyone working together to have accurate information on our families.  I hope by writing this blog, I'm contributing to some of the sharing of information.  When I mess up, which is more often than I'd like, I want to fix my messes, which are entirely my own fault, and give credit where credit is due.

So thank you, Anne Caston, and thank you, Virginia Perry. I hope to get it right this time!