Alan Vogel

Ancestors

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Biography

I was born in Allentown, PA, but I have not lived most of my life in Pennsylvania. When I was one year old, we moved to Parma, OH. One other time I lived in Allentown when I was 11 years old, but that was just for a few months. But when I was growing up in Ohio, we would go back to the Allentown area to visit our relatives every year. Both my parents were born in Northampton County.

I became interested in the history of our family when I was in college, I think. I heard stories about my mother's family from her sister, my Aunt Margaret. She said that their great-grandmother, Mary Fenstermacher, came from Europe with her son John, their grandfather, who was wounded in the Civil War. Aunt Margaret took me to see the gravestone that marked the place where both Mary and John were buried, a few miles from where she and my uncle lived in Walnutport, PA. We have a photograph of Mary taken shortly before she died in 1906.

Mary Fenstermacher was remarkable in living to just a couple of months shy of 100 years. So I thought I might find something about her death in the local newspaper where she died, in Mauch Chunk, PA. I looked through the old newspapers on microfilm at the library, and sure enough, I found an article about her death on the front page of the newspaper. It said that she was the oldest resident of Carbon County.

It turns out that both Mary and her son John were born in the United States. I discovered that Mary ("Polly Fenstermacker") is mentioned in Brenckman's history of Carbon County, and this gave me the name of her parents, George Ziegenfuss and Susannah Nolf. Then I was able to connect with many other people's research.

It took me much longer to find out about Mary's husband, John Fenstermacher. Decades later I finally came across the information about his family in an obscure manuscript, Beckel's "A Genealogical History of the Fenstermacher Family." Both John's and Mary's ancestors had come to Pennsylvania from Europe before the Revolution.

I started researching the Vogel family through census records, and I remember how excited I was when I discovered an ancestor (William Vogle) who was born before 1800. It was his father, George Vogel, who came to Pennsylvania from Europe in 1773. Since then I have enjoyed finding many of my other Pennsylvania German ancestors' names in the manifests of the ships that came to Philadelphia in the 1700s.

As for how I got started with WikiTree, this did not happen through seeing an advertisement or receiving a recommendation from a friend. As I was working on my genealogy, at some point I wondered whether there might be a site dedicated to genealogy where people could cooperate as they do on Wikipedia. As I looked around on the internet, I came upon WikiTree, and immediately joined. It has turned out to be much better than I had even hoped!

It appears there are not many famous Americans who are/were descendents of Pennsylvania Germans. So far I have found only two distant cousins who were well known, Clark Gable (through the Frankenfield family) and Emanuel Vogel Gerhart (a theologian and seminary president). Emanuel's son William had one of the more interesting careers among my relatives: he was commander of the 125th US Colored Infantry during the Civil War, which was active in the Southwestern US.

Sources

• First-hand information.

Advance Directive

To aid WikiTree in the administration of my account should I be incapacitated, or in the event of my death, I hereby give permission for all private profiles I am managing to be transferred to any interested WikiTreers, whether or not they are currently on the Trusted Lists.