Anna Maria, wife of George P Motz, is perhaps my biggest brick wall — what was her maiden name, who was her father? I don’t know.

But I have clues — perhaps too many.

1. I have found a church record as follows: "CD 129 -- Church Records of Berks County -- 1/30/1776, Anna Maria Fritz, daughter of Johannes, married George Motz, son of Heinrich. Records of Rev. Heinrich Moeller." And then there is this: "CD 196 -- Early PA Birth Records -- George Moatz and Anna Maria were the parents of daughter Elizabeth born 9/11/1783 in Berks County."

This is an incrediby intriguing record. Obviously it is exactly the names of the people I am looing for and the timing is exactly right (their oldest child Catherine was born in November 1776). Plus there are these two additional facts. George Motz, son of Heinrich. It is my belief that Heinrich was the father of my ancestor George Motz. Anna Maria daughter of Johannes. My 4G grandparents, George and Anna Maria Motz had only one son who they named John. Yes, if my theory is right, George had a brother named John but his brother Michael, it would seem, was more important to him. Was John named for Anna Maria’s father.

But there are complicating issues. Wasn’t George from Lancaster, what’s he doing in Berks? And by 1783, wasn’t George established in Penns Township, why would he go back to Berks to baptize daughter Elizabeth? (Remember George has one daughter we don’t know here name, the third unnamed married daughter referred to in his will.). (And note an Elizabeth Motz is buried in the same cemetery where supposedly George and Anna Maria are buried. The transcription of her tombstone shows only a birth day, no year, and a date of death, no year. So she could be anybody but the birth day does not match the known birth day of Elizabeth of Berks County and there is also the fact that she was Motz, not some married name, so wouldn’t seem to be the third married daughter.)

My Motz experts believe this George can be found among the taxables of Berks County into the early 1780’s while my George Motz was in an overlapping time period being taxed in Penns Township and therefore was a different George Motz.

2. On 3 Oct 1791, upon the decease of Peter Markley of (now) Snyder County, the court named Elizabeth Markley and George Motz as administrators of his estate. This makes me wonder whether George was Peter’s son-in-law. I would guess that Elizabeth was Peter’s wife. Peter Mercle was listed in the 1790 Census in Northumberland County on page 81 (Nicholas Mertz was on page 80 and George Moatz on page 84) -- probably all in Penns Township.

So a guess was that that Anna Mary may have been Anna Mary Markley.

3. It turns out George was also an Executor for Frederick Truckenmiller’s estate and maybe the fact that a Peter Markley with wife Elizabeth were named several times in the same church records where Heinrich Motz and family were mentioned only ndicates that Peter and George were just friends.

And it also turns out that Andrew Moor/Moore, in 1801, appointed his two sons John George and Philip Morr and his “good friend” George Mootz as his Executors. George seemed to be everybody’s favorite Executor.

4. When I wasn’t sure of daughter Catherine’s maiden name, I observed that she gave all her sons the same middle name Peter and maybe that was her maiden name. It wasn’t, it was Motz, but could it have been Anna Maria’s maiden name?

5. Working with my Motz experts, from many different references we also identified many additional surnames that seemed to have some association with George Motz, including Wetzel, Haines, Meiser, Peter and Gemberllng to which of course we added the above Truckenmiller, Markley, Fritz (or Friess) and Morr names to have a master list of names to subject to a DNA matching project.

I searched for all persons with any one of those surnames in their tree and examined all those trees. I took many of those people as well all my known cousins who share Motz with me and looked at our shared matches to see if any one of these additional names seemed to crop up with some frequency.

It’s hard to summarize these findings in any conclusive way. No matter the name, there would be a group of cousins who indeed had that name in their tree and, in fact, Snyder County ancrestors of that name but whoever that analysis suggested as perhaps my common ancestor wth those folks, could apparently be ruled out with addtional findings about that suspect person. Nothing worked.

Anna Maria, despite an effort that analyzed hundreds of cousins’ trees remains a brick wall.










Finally, there is a George Motz in Lancaster County in the 1790 Census.

We know from his will that the wife of our George Motz was named Mary, and I have seen her in more than one place referred to as Anna Mary. Fisher says her name was Marie Fritz, but I think that is simply wrong.

The marriage of George Motz (son of Heinrich) and Anna Marie Fritz in Jan 1776 was documented. And the birth of daughter Elizabeth in 1783 in Berks County to parents George Motz and Anna Maria was also documented.

But I believe it was a different George Motz whose father was Heinrich, who married Anna Maria Fritz and lived in Berks County as late as 1783. I believe that my George was already in Freeburg by 1776 plus I'm not aware of any daughter named Elizabeth (though he did have one daughter yet unidentified). I do not think Mary was born Fritz.

Tried Sebastian Truckenmiller in Thrulines. Had 0 matches to him but strangely 16 to his suppsoed wife Rosina Catharina Mayer but all were Motzes (mostly via George Peter and Anna Maria).

Now trying Heinrich Peter.

The story of my search for the name of George Peter’s father is told under the heading “Discrepant Facts”. After 20 years of reseach, I only had two possible candidates to be the father of George Motz and presumably his two brothers, Michael and John: Jacob or Caspar.

Heinrich Motz. Then in 2020, Steve Dale, a descendant of Michael Motz, contacted me and he had irrefutable evidence that Michael Motz was the son of Heinrich.  He had found Michael’s baptism record at a church in Warwick Township, Lancaster County.  Later in that same church Michael and his wife Barbara baptized a daughter Eva.  And Eva becomes the carry-through that indeed Michael from Warwick was Michael who died in Centre County because Eva’s Centre County tombstone gives that exact same birth date as found in her Lancaster County baptism.  

Does that make Heinrich the father of George? I’m still looking for more evidence but the fact that he was Michael’s father moves Heinrich to the top of the list of suspects.

Later in 2020, I came in contact with two Motz researchers, Kimberly Allen and Tim Weeder, and I now consider their work on people named Motz to be comparable to my work on people named Mertz or Martz. It is all encompassing, covering everyone of this name whether related to the others or not, backed up by hard documented evidence and a tenacious approach to finding every relevant fact and weighing it in terms of the conclusions they’ve drawn.

They both believe 100% that Michael was Heinrich’s son. And they believe strongly that so was John though in his case there is a small birth date discrepancy that has to be considered. They are not as convinced that Heinrich was George’s father.

The problem is there are church baptism records which might seem to list all of Heinrich’s children and there was no George. (There is gap in the records where George might fit, but alas, no George.) Now my view is that those records were compiled form different other underlying source records and maybe the compiler simply didn’t find the baptism of George or perhaps his baptism just went unrecorded.

Another problem is clearly there were other George Motz, though the ones they know of can reasonably be ruled out and of course there were other older Motz who may well have had a son named George but no record of that George has ever been found.

In sum, there is no real evidence that Heinrich was his father — but also no real evidence that he wasn’t or that anyone else was.

I believe though a strong case can be made in support of the idea that Michael, John and George were brothers and all were sons of Heinrich:

1. George gets to Penn Township in 1776 at the same time as Michael and John.
2. George and Michael both baptized children at the same church.
3. George and Michael both had a close connection to the Haines family of Penns Township. George’s daughter, Anna Maria, married Lorentz Haines. When Michael baptized daughter Elizabeth, the sponsors were John and Regina Haines. The will of John Haines of Penns Township was written 5 Apr 1811 and proved 9 Feb 1815. He mentioned wife Regina and ten children: George, Margaret (wife of Peter Frees), Anna Mary (wife of Peter Straub), Catherine (wife of Henry Heimbach), Fredrick, Lorentz, Elizabeth (wife of John Smith), Peter, Christina (wife of Henry Mertz) and Jacob. (Henry Mertz was the brother of Peter Mertz who married Catherine Motz.) The Haines family was tight with the Mertz family and tight with both the G P Motz family and the Michael Motz family.
4. Not just Egle, but Fisher and (another local genealogist) Mary B Lontz got the idea in their heads they were brothers. Remember these people not just looked at real documents, they were the compilers of (some of) those real documents and they also talked genealogy with many local "old-timers" (not Egle, but Fisher and Lontz were local) so they were processing things they had heard in some way or another along with things they could see in writing.
5. George was named the Executor of the will of Peter Markely who was previously named in the records of the Warwick church where Heinrich worshipped.
6. In 1773, George Motes — of Lancaster County — requested permission to take up 100 acres of land “within a quarter mile from Michael Motes’ upon Chestnut Hill in Penns Township”. It’s not clear to me if this “warrant application” was made for a very specific 100 acres George had already identified or whether George was requesting permission to go find an available 100 acres near Michael Motes. It doesn’t really matter, the two things of importance here are that George was from Lancaster County and Michael Motes is of some importance to him.
7. Also in 1773, Michael Motz of Lancaster County sold to George Motz of the same place 100 acres adjoining his own land and that of George Herrold. Michael had only recently bought that land.

My Motz experts argue, yes, these are all coincidences and maybe George was related to Michael but not a brother.

1790. George Moatz lived in North’d Co. His brothers, Michael Motz and John Motes are also present, but could be in the very western reaches of then Northumberland Co whose westward boundaries at the time extended well beyond present day Snyder and Union Counties.

1800. George Moats lived in Penns Twp. There are extra people in his household especially a male under 10. It is one of his married children and their young son I am sure. His brothers John and Michael Moats have removed to Haines Twp (I assume Centre County).

Charles A Fisher in ”Snyder County Pioneers” said that George was buried with his wife in Freeburg at St. Peter’s Church (where his son John Motz, Peter Mertz and wife and some Hilbishes were buried). A Mormon church (LDS) database record for him (that may or may not be reliable) gives the same information and the date of birth and date of death I show for George. But I was not able to find him when I went to that cemetery and he is not listed among the buried by Wagensellar who transcribed all Snyder County tombstones around the year 1900. I did find his son’s grave and immediately behind him was Catherine and her husband Peter, one more piece of evidence for the Catherine-George relationship.

The baptism of daughter Susan in 1786 and daughter Barbara in 1789 at Zion Morr’s were both picked up and listed by Charles Fisher in his Early PA Births.

George’s will, written 4 Feb 1806 proved 22 Feb 1806, is on file in Northumberland County. We can learn certain names from his will: his wife was Mary, his son was John, a son-in-law was Larents Hanes, his youngest unmarried daughters were Susanna and Barbara, his other daughters were married and in total he had 6 children.

And we know that G Peter Motz was listed in Fisher's marriages book as the father of Anna Maria Motz who married Lawrence Haines.

So he had one son and five daughters. His two unmarried daughters were Susan and Barbara, leaving three married daughters, one of whom was Anna Maria. One I beleve storngly was Catherine. I have no idea who the other daughter may have been or even her given name.