She had reason to guard the sons she had left. Over eleven years Elizabeth bore seven children and buried three of them as infants, including a first Salomon whose name she gave again to the next boy. By the time she packed for America she had stood at the edge of three small graves. She was not going to lose the rest to a recruiter’s ledger.

Elizabeth got her family onto the Francis and Elizabeth at Rotterdam. Somewhere on the crossing, or in the first raw days after Philadelphia, she died, along with the baby John. She never saw America. But not one of her surviving sons was ever sold to a war. She bought that outcome with her life and never lived to know she had won.

Whether your name is spelled Glattfelder, Glatfelter, Clodfelter, Gladfelter, or one of the other ways it has traveled, this is where the family sits down and talks about where it came from.

Read the full story: https://glattfelder.news/post/why-elizabeth-wanted-to-leave

This episode is derived from the book The Early Glattfelder Family in America and The Casper Glattfelder Association of America: The First Hundred Years, pages 3–4 and 9–10. Buy your own copy at https://glattfelder.news/books/early-glattfelder.

From the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.

He had earned that misery. Casper left Glattfelden, near Zurich, in the spring of 1743 with his wife Elizabeth, her seventy-year-old father, and four children — part of a convoy of six families from one small parish. The crossing on the Francis and Elizabeth took the better part of three months. It cost him Elizabeth’s father, almost certainly buried at sea, and very likely Elizabeth herself and their infant son John, who both vanish from the record right here.

So the founder of a family that now numbers more than fifty thousand began his American life sick, grieving, and alone with four children. He raised his hand, swore allegiance to a king he had never seen, and went to work. Within two weeks he had bought land. He remarried, fathered six sons, and started over from almost nothing.

Whether your name is spelled Glattfelder, Glatfelter, Clodfelter, Gladfelter, or one of the other ways it has traveled, this is where the family sits down and talks about where it came from.

Read the full story: https://glattfelder.news/post/the-man-who-was-sick-the-day-he-landed

This episode is derived from the book The Early Glattfelder Family in America and The Casper Glattfelder Association of America: The First Hundred Years, pages 4–6 and 9–10. Buy your own copy at https://glattfelder.news/books/early-glattfelder.

From the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.

This episode is about what they did with that curiosity. A York county pastor named Adam Stump decided the family ought to gather, for no occasion in particular, and pulled in two cousins to help. They called themselves a self-constituted committee and held exactly zero meetings. They made their plans, in their own words, “as we chance to see each other” — a word on a street corner, a note passed along, a few minutes after church. Stump borrowed a Sunday school’s benches, hired a hay wagon to shuttle people up from the train, wrote a ten-verse hymn, and printed the whole plan in his church bulletin.

On September 8, 1906, an estimated 1,200 people turned out in a borrowed patch of woods near Loganville. The benches ran short. That shortage was the first proof the family wanted to be reassembled, and it is the reason the association, the park, and this newsletter exist today.

Whether your name is spelled Glattfelder, Glatfelter, Clodfelter, Gladfelter, or one of the other ways it has traveled, this is where the family sits down and talks about where it came from.

Read the full story: https://glattfelder.news/post/three-men-who-never-held-a-meeting

This episode is derived from the book The Early Glattfelder Family in America and The Casper Glattfelder Association of America: The First Hundred Years, pages 85–87. Buy your own copy at https://glattfelder.news/books/early-glattfelder.

From the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.

Noah Miller Glatfelter spent forty years as a doctor and decades of his spare time writing letters to relatives he’d never met, digging through church records, wills, and land deeds. What he produced was the first full account of this family: eight hundred and sixty-one families, traced all the way back to Casper Glattfelder, who stepped off a boat in Philadelphia in 1743. Nobody paid him. He did it because he knew that if he didn’t, the thread would break.

That book set everything in motion — the reunions, Heimwald Park on the hill above the old homestead, the patio bricks carrying thirteen hundred of our names.

The Glattfelder Gazette picks up where Noah left off. Every week we take one ancestor out of the records and tell their story the way you’d tell it across a kitchen table. Whether your name is spelled Glattfelder, Glatfelter, Clodfelter, Gladfelter, or any of the other ways it has traveled, this is where the family sits down and talks about where it came from.

The first story arrives July 25, 2026, and a new one follows every week.

Follow the show now, so the first one is waiting for you.

Read the full origin story: https://glattfelder.news/post/how-this-all-started

From the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.