Glattfelder Gazette
The Glattfelder Gazette is a free weekly email newsletter and accompanying podcast that tells the story of the Glattfelder family — one short, readable story at a time. Each issue delivers a single story drawn from more than 280 years of family history, designed to be read in about five minutes. It's not a genealogy database or a research journal. It's a storytelling vehicle designed to reach the thousands of Glattfelder descendants — many of whom carry different last names and have no idea how deep their family's story goes — and give them a reason to care about where they come from.
Introducing the Glattfelder Gazette
In 1901, a retired Army surgeon in St. Louis published a book nobody had asked him to write.
Noah Miller Glatfelter spent forty years as a doctor and decades of his spare time writing letters to relatives he’d never met, digging through church records, wills, and land deeds. What he produced was the first full account of this family: eight hundred and sixty-one families, traced all the way back to Casper Glattfelder, who stepped off a boat in Philadelphia in 1743. Nobody paid him. He did it because he knew that if he didn’t, the thread would brea...
S1E2 The Francis and Elizabeth
When Casper Glattfelder's brother died near Basel in 1742, he left a widow, Salomea, and six children with no way to reach America. Casper already had his own wife, Elizabeth, and seven children of his own. He took all of them anyway — and in 1743 carried two families across the Atlantic on a single ship, the Francis and Elizabeth.
Almost every name this family wears in America rode on that one decision. This is the story of the crossing that made the rest possible.
Read this story: glattfelder.news/gazette/the-francis-and-elizabeth
If you enjoy these st...
S1E1 The Man Who Died at Basel
In 1742, a Swiss farmer named Hans Peter Glattfelder sold everything, gathered six families, and set out to take his wife and six children across an ocean to America. He died near Basel, before they reached the open water — and the family turned back, against the current of everything they had planned, to bury him at home.
This is the story of how the American branch of the Glattfelder family nearly ended before it began, and the one decision, by one other person, that kept it alive.
Read this story: glattfelder.news/gazette/the-man-who-died-at-basel
If...
Meet the Glattfelder Gazette
Somewhere on a road between Virginia and Indiana, around 1832, a girl lost her bonnet. Hundreds of us are here because of what happened next.
That’s the kind of story the Glattfelder Gazette tells. Every week we take one ancestor out of the reunion programs, the family histories, and the letters nobody had opened in decades, and we tell their story the way you’d tell it across a kitchen table. Not a lecture. Not a museum tour.
Whether your name is spelled Glattfelder, Glatfelter, Clodfelter, Gladfelter, or any of the other ways it h...
