Here is Oakey Mertz in Mertztown, Longswamp Township, PA and Mary Lawther Mertz in Blanford Cemetery, Petersburg, VA where her 3rd-great-grandparents are buried.

If the genealogists who came before me -- all of whom believed that all pioneer Mertzes of Northumberland County were descended from John Henry Mertz of Rockland Township, Berks County -- had discovered the village of Mertztown they might have realized their big mistake. Instead, when they went looking for their Mertz ancestors in Berks County, they looked no further than Mertz Church.

Sure, that was an obvious place to look and so when they found there people of the names they were looking for, they figured the relationships were obvious. In Longswamp Township, though, there was an entirely different and unrelated Mertz family -- that of John David Mertz who had grandsons also matching the Northumberland names (in fact a better match) and it turns out all pioneer Northumberland Mertzes were of that family. Mertztown, I believe, was named for John David or his sons Peter and Nicholas.

The Blanford graves are those of Theophilus Rivers Lawther and Mary Harrison Lawther. They are buried there with their son Richard who died as an infant and their daughter Fannie and her husband Walter G Ford.

John David Mertz, my immigrant ancestor, left Hangviller, Alsace in 1733 to come to America. His father, Peter, lived in the neighboring village of Bust. Peter’s father, Jacob, had been the Mayor of Rosenwiller after he moved there from Switzerland in the mid-1600’s. A later immigrant, Gottfried, who came to the St. Louis area in the 1840’s had lived previously in Preuschdorf, where his ancestors had moved when they left Switzerland. All of this area of Alsace was part of or closely associated with the loosely federated German States when my ancestors left.

DNA proves that all these people were closely related, I am related to them, and there are many persons named Mertz living today in that region of what is now France who are my cousins.

All these towns are north and northwest of Strasbourg, France -- the nearest major city. Note the route to Preuschdorf goes right through the village of Mertzwiller, what a fascinating name.

This old building is on the site of what was the Blue Ball Inn from Revolutionary times, on the (then) main road from Baltimore to York. It is the main residence on a rather large farm.

It was the home of my aunt and uncle -- Ginny and Guy Leader -- in the 1950's and for many years thereafter; they owned the farm. There was an old cemetery on the farm that Guy lovingly did his best to restore and maintain for no other reason than that it was an old cemetery and deserved respect. He had no idea who those people named Hendrix were.

The wonderful twist to this story is that four of those persons named Hendrix were direct ancestors of mine and of my Aunt Ginny. The name only appears in our family tree many generations back and any memory of it as a family name had long since disappeared. It took genealogy to figure the relationships out.

Mary had an ancestor named Richard Herring. He did not serve as a soldier in the war, he was over age 50 after all, but he operated, with a partner, an arms factory in Sampson County, NC and there a road sign memorializes and honors their activities.

The Herrings came to America, the Jamestown, Virginia area in 1623 and over time and over several generations, like many early Virginia families, migrated ever southward and ended up in what became Sampson County by about 1750.