Inheritance
We are descendants of the Schwenkfelders, religious rebels who fled Silesia (now southwest Poland) in the early 1700s. They worshiped in their homes without church, priest or catechism.
The sect was at odds with Luther and the Pope. Bibles and land were seized. Children were taken from families so that they would not grow to doubt the transubstantiation of the host or subordination to the state or Rome. Unrepentant Schwenkfelders were chained to oars on Mediterranean galleys and conscripted to fight Ottoman invaders. They were denied burial in consecrated ground - made to lay their dead under cow paths outside their village of Harpersdorf.
Early in the 18th century, they loaded possessions into wheelbarrows and fled westward in darkness. Three Dutch merchants of Harlem, the Van Buychanse brothers, provided succor and hired a ship to take one hundred forty Schwenkfelders to Pennsylvania, America's most tolerant colony. The inspiration for the Van Buychanse[1] beneficence is unknown. The St. Andrew sailed for three months and soon after arrival, the Schwenkfelders celebrated a thanksgiving, Gedächtnestag, on September 24, 1734.
E. Gertrude Schultz Wilkinson, my grandmother, was the third child of Jonas Kriebel Schultz and Elva Gertrude Shoemaker Schultz. Jonas was a farmer's son, a wholesaler of eggs and dairy in Philadelphia, dealing in the produce of the Kreibels, Hiebners, Schweikers and other Schwenkfelders who farmed outside of the city. His office was a block from Penn's Landing, where Schwenkfelders first set foot in the colonies. A photograph of Jonas shows a man of substantial girth and a dramatic mustache. He was the head of the wholesalers' group in Philadelphia in the early 20th century. He he was on the list for the Presidential Electoral College in the early 1900s in support of the Prohibition Party.
Gertrude met J. Edgar Wilkinson while she was studying nursing and he the law. They planned to marry when she completed her studies. Her forty-six-year-old mother's surprise pregnancy changed this plan. Jonas forsook the family bed and moved down the hall, never to return. Elva gave birth to Elizabeth and turned her own back, “never showing Betty a kindness in her life." Gertrude put off nursing and marriage plans and stayed to raise Betty. Edgar built a practice in Orphans' Court and exercised patience, until they married in 1917.
My dad, James Edgar Wilkinson, Jr., was born a year later. Betty married Wilson Wiggins and childless, they lived in North Philadelphia into old age. My family never picked up much in the way gift-giving habits – Grandma never sent any that I can now recall – but every six months or so, a letter and packet of miscellany would arrive from Aunt Betty and Uncle Wilson. It might include a coloring book, magazines, a pencil and other sundries. But each time we found a stack of card boards that stiffened the laundered, starched and pressed white shirts Wilson wore daily to the Boyertown Casket Co. Boards perfect for arts and craft projects, like on Halloween, to make gravestones, perhaps the ones our ancestors were denied.
[1] A Dutch friend with excellent English points out how lucky they were to run into these brothers, “by chance.”
We are descendants of the Schwenkfelders, religious rebels who fled Silesia (now southwest Poland) in the early 1700s. They worshiped in their homes without church, priest or catechism.
The sect was at odds with Luther and the Pope. Bibles and land were seized. Children were taken from families so that they would not grow to doubt the transubstantiation of the host or subordination to the state or Rome. Unrepentant Schwenkfelders were chained to oars on Mediterranean galleys and conscripted to fight Ottoman invaders. They were denied burial in consecrated ground - made to lay their dead under cow paths outside their village of Harpersdorf.
Early in the 18th century, they loaded possessions into wheelbarrows and fled westward in darkness. Three Dutch merchants of Harlem, the Van Buychanse brothers, provided succor and hired a ship to take one hundred forty Schwenkfelders to Pennsylvania, America's most tolerant colony. The inspiration for the Van Buychanse[1] beneficence is unknown. The St. Andrew sailed for three months and soon after arrival, the Schwenkfelders celebrated a thanksgiving, Gedächtnestag, on September 24, 1734.
E. Gertrude Schultz Wilkinson, my grandmother, was the third child of Jonas Kriebel Schultz and Elva Gertrude Shoemaker Schultz. Jonas was a farmer's son, a wholesaler of eggs and dairy in Philadelphia, dealing in the produce of the Kreibels, Hiebners, Schweikers and other Schwenkfelders who farmed outside of the city. His office was a block from Penn's Landing, where Schwenkfelders first set foot in the colonies. A photograph of Jonas shows a man of substantial girth and a dramatic mustache. He was the head of the wholesalers' group in Philadelphia in the early 20th century. He he was on the list for the Presidential Electoral College in the early 1900s in support of the Prohibition Party.
Gertrude met J. Edgar Wilkinson while she was studying nursing and he the law. They planned to marry when she completed her studies. Her forty-six-year-old mother's surprise pregnancy changed this plan. Jonas forsook the family bed and moved down the hall, never to return. Elva gave birth to Elizabeth and turned her own back, “never showing Betty a kindness in her life." Gertrude put off nursing and marriage plans and stayed to raise Betty. Edgar built a practice in Orphans' Court and exercised patience, until they married in 1917.
My dad, James Edgar Wilkinson, Jr., was born a year later. Betty married Wilson Wiggins and childless, they lived in North Philadelphia into old age. My family never picked up much in the way gift-giving habits – Grandma never sent any that I can now recall – but every six months or so, a letter and packet of miscellany would arrive from Aunt Betty and Uncle Wilson. It might include a coloring book, magazines, a pencil and other sundries. But each time we found a stack of card boards that stiffened the laundered, starched and pressed white shirts Wilson wore daily to the Boyertown Casket Co. Boards perfect for arts and craft projects, like on Halloween, to make gravestones, perhaps the ones our ancestors were denied.
[1] A Dutch friend with excellent English points out how lucky they were to run into these brothers, “by chance.”
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