Missing Persons

One of the things I love to do is track down a family that no one seems to know what happened to them. I just scored another victory with a Stauffer family. I had five generations of the Stauffer family from Mathias to David but that's where his line stopped. Was he never married? No one seemed to know.

David Stauffer was born in 1833 to Henry and Anna (Shirk) Martin. David died in 1876 and was buried in the Weaverland Mennonite Cemetery. That's all I knew about him. I started digging and found his estate papers in Berks County. He moved to the city of Reading about 1872. His will said he had a wife "Mattie" (nickname for Martha) and a son Theodore D. Stauffer. More searching turned up Martha (d. 1895) and Theodore, both buried at Churchtown. Two missing persons found!

Theodore was born in 1864 and died in Reading in 1913. I found his obituary in the Reading Eagle. It said he had one sister, Mrs. Charles Heist. That was a speed bump but I soon found his estate papers which showed that Mrs. Charles Heist was actually his daughter, not his sister. Her name was Helen M. Heist and she was his only child.

Helen was married to Charles Heist in Chicago in 1912 when she was 23 (if she was honest about her age on her marriage license). I don't know what the story is behind being married in Chicago because they were both born in Pennsylvania. They had one son, Charles Jr. Helen and Charles wound up in Buffalo, New York, where they died and were buried. Charles died in 1954 and Helen in 1964. 

Charles Heist Jr. was born in 1916 in Chicago and married Clydis McLendon.  In 1954, he founded a painting and sandblasting company he named after himself, C. H. Heist Company. He had a son, C. H. Heist III who took over the company when Charles II died in 1983 in Florida. Clydis died in 2005.
Charles H. Heist III was born in 1950 and the C. H. Heist company grew to a large corporation under his leadership. He had a son Charles H. Heist IV born in 1982 who is living in Florida today.

That completes the descendants of David Stauffer. It's the kind of puzzle I like to put together. It took some searching but all the pieces were found on the Internet. Genealogy research has become much easier with so many resources available without leaving home. I would have spent a day going to the courthouse to find the records I could see with a few clicks of a mouse.