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Roadside genealogy, Oley Township edition.
I pulled over this afternoon in front of the De Benneville House, where a 1924 Historical Society of Berks County marker records that George de Benneville, M.D. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G… , the founder of Universalism in America, built the place in 1745 and used it as a church for its first decade. He married Esther Bertolet, daughter of Jean Bertolet, the pioneer Huguenot memorialized in granite just across the way by his descendants in 1902. The geography here is personal before it is historical: The Bertolet memorial stands directly across from one of the Mill Tract tenant farms where my Uncle Walt lived, his father (and now my cousin Drei) lived on Mill Tract Farm (built by Daniel Boone's Grandfather en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M… ) proper, and my second cousin has the farm next door. These are still working farms, corn and pasture behind the same fence lines, and all of it sits just up the road from Cassel Road, where I grew up gunnarmiller.substack.c…
Naturally I wondered: Am I directly related to any of these people? So I ran the family tree from the driver's seat. The answer, checked against all 2,521 people in the file: No Bertolet or de Benneville blood anywhere in my direct line. What I found instead was something more Oley than ancestry. Jean Bertolet's son Abraham married the half-sister of my 7th-great-grandmother. The LeVan burial ground where my ancestors lie sits on Bertolet Mill Road. And a couple of generations after de Benneville preached in the valley, my kin were naming their sons Benneville in his honor.
One thread the stone left me: It records Jean's wife as Susanna née de Harcourt, the same surname as my 8th-great-grandmother across the valley. Whether the two Harcourt women were related is a question for another day. Not family, exactly; just three hundred years of the same few square miles.
