Her life story, what little we know about it, is told in a very interesting York County deed which stated that after her first husband died, she married Jacob Meyer and he died in about 1790.

Catherine is a perfect example of what genealogists call a dead-end wife. All I know is her name. Now she might have been a second wife to George and not the mother of his daughters, but let’s assume not. If she were the mother of his daughters, or of Mary Elizabeth specifically, then she is important to us. She might well be the daughter of someone who I would like to know about, maybe an interesting family with a 2 or 3 generation history in America.

But there is no marriage record for George Messerle to Catherine that might give her name. There are no baptismal records for his two daughters that sometimes state the maiden name of the mother -- or that might name a sponsor which could be a clue to it. The best hope to find her name would be a will or property deed relating to her father. A will might say “to my daughter Catherine intermarried with George Messerle” -- that would be a wonderful find. Or a deed might have similar wording, just as the key deed I found here did, identifying George Messerle’s daughter Elizabeth intermarried with George Hamscher. The problem with those kinds of things is, unless you’re very lucky or unless someone has abstracted all wills or deeds and then created an every-name index, there is no way to find such documents. It might be out there and someday we might find out Catherine’s name -- but for now it’s a mystery.

I began doing genealogy in about the year 2000 and I have probably known that Elizabeth Messerle belonged in my family tree since maybe 2002. Now I didn’t spend the interim 10 years exclusively searching for the name of Elizabeth’s father, but it was always on a list of things I wanted to know and something I’d often try to figure out when looking at any records where his name, or even a clue to it, might be found.

For some time, I thought her father’s name might well be Daniel -- the only adult Messerle male in York County at that time. I knew that Daniel and Anna Messerle were present in York County by 1755, baptized Anna Maria in July 1755, Peter in April 1760 and Susanna Catharina in June 1763 -- all at Strayer’s (Salem) Reformed Church.

Moreover, at the same church where George and Elizabeth married, and at about the same time (1784), Peter Messerle married Christina Welty and John Huber married Susanna Messerle.

The problem is I concluded I had to rule Daniel Messerle out as Elizabeth’s father when I searched for and found his will and it said he had four children and he named them: Peter, Susanna wife of John Hoover (Huber), Anna Mary wife of Jacob Hoover and Abraham. Elizabeth was still quite alive at the time the will was written and so this was a huge conundrum.

Now among the things I checked over the years were York deed books and my approach, whenever I would examine one of those books, was to check the index for all of our York County names (Curry, Koller, Hendrix, Hampshire, Messerle, Gerberich, etc.). The name Messerle only ever came up in reference either to deeds executed by Daniel or later his sons Abraham and Peter. There was no other Messerle ever listed. Same with church records, wills and every other kind of record available to genealogists -- no one else named Messerle.

Curiously, though, (and maddeningly really) I did one time actually look at the deed that eventually led to the proof that Elizabeth’s father was named George. I looked at that deed because Jacob Koller was named first on that deed, as the Grantor -- and Koller being one of our York County surnames of interest, I wanted to see if it was relevant to my research into the Koller family. Jacob, though, was acting as the administrator of the estate of Jacob Meyer on the deed and the first several lines of the deed mentioned both Jacobs and recounted the early history of the land tract being sold -- all involving names I didn’t recognize -- and so after just a few minutes I quickly concluded the deed was not going to be useful to me and moved on.

Little did I know that had I just read a few lines further along in the deed -- at about line twelve actually -- I would have found the “gold” wherein it stated that Elizabeth Messerle wife of George Hamsher and daughter of George Messerle and her sister Margaret had signed over their interest in the tract of land to Jacob Meyer after he married their widowed mother -- it was all spelled out!

But I didn’t find out all that until finally in 2012 -- so ten years on the hunt -- when I asked Becky Curry to review my findings on all of Lida Slade Hoshall’s ancestors -- wherein I stated how frustrating it was not to know Elizabeth’s father, and so Becky went and looked at something compiled locally there in York which was an all name index to those deeds. It went beyond a standard Grantor and Grantee index and picked up every name listed -- in this case George Messerle.

I still know very little about George, though, nor do I have any idea as to the maiden name of his wife Catherine. I can make a few guesses about the facts of George’s life though.

I don’t know when he was born, but --

• Elizabeth, probably his older daughter, was born in about 1764.

• So a guess would be that George was born about 1740, give or take a few years.

I don’t know when he died, but --

• The release his daughters signed to Jacob Meyer was in 1787, their mother already being married to him.

• So a guess would be that George died about 1785, at about age 45.

I don’t know whether he was an immigrant or was born in America but I suspect an immigrant. I do know that --

• Daniel was born in about 1717 and came to America in 1749.

• So while my first thought would be that maybe George was Daniel’s younger brother (there is nothing in the record to indicate that), that’s a fairly big gap between Daniel and George. George could almost have been his son, but then Daniel would have made some mention of George’s family in his 1792 will.

The deed whereby Jacob Koller sold the land of Jacob Meyer that came to him as a result of his marriage to George Messerle’s widow mentioned that George and Catherine had two daughters: Elizabeth intermarried with George Hamsher and Margaret.

There is a record that a Margaret Messerlischi married Gottfried Miller 19 May 1789 at the same church where Elizabeth had married George. This could well be Margaret Messerle as that is the only instance of that strange spelling of a surname I can find. Jacob Meyer’s land was sold to Frederick Miller Jr. -- whether Gottfried had any connection to him, I don’t know, but it is worth pondering.