A History of the Riddlebarger (Rötlisperger) Family __________________________________________ Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away; they fly forgotten, as a dream dies at the op’ning day. -- Isaac Watts, from “O God, Our Help in Ages Past” _______________________________ Summer 2019 _________________________________ Dr. Kim Riddlebarger Introduction (2005, 2013, and Revised in 2016/18/19) The biggest danger with a family history is that it may inadvertently turn out to be the history of the author! Such is not my intention, but I make no pretense of objectivity. This is a history written by a Riddlebarger for other Riddlebargers and interested parties. The specific purpose of this humble effort is to compose a factual account of those forebears I did not know and an oral history of those I did, to pass on to my beloved sons (David Clayton and Mark Thomas) and to their children’s children something I wish I had—a history of the life and times of those who have gone before me and whose long and multi-syllabic name I now bear. Family legend had it that my own grandfather, “Pop” (Glenn A.), had done some genealogical research on the Riddlebarger family, but this was long thought to be lost–the unfortunate casualty of those hectic days in 1978 when my grandmother Ruth (known to us by her nickname “Dine”) was moving from her Lakewood, CA, home on 5208 Hanbury Street into convalescent care. Somehow Pop’s work disappeared without trace in the chaos. In March of 2012, Lynne Riddlebarger McMahon (my late first cousin), emailed me to let me know that Pop’s genealogical research had been discovered among the papers of his daughter-in-law, Heloise Riddlebarger, who died on November 26, 2011. What was thought lost was suddenly found. Although Pop’s work provided scant new information, it did confirm much of my research and included several important family photos which I had no Letter from Glenn Riddlebarger, dated July 5, 1938, found in the Franklin County Recorder’s office in idea even existed. Little did I know when I began this Chambersburg PA, in the file on “Riddlesberger.” project back in 1997 that one of “Pop’s” query letters, written more than sixty years earlier, would surface in a long forgotten Riddlebarger family file in the Franklin County Recorder’s office in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. The thought occurred to me that my own humble effort to set forth our families’ history may, in fact, serve to complete the effort to find our forbears which my own grandfather began back in 1938. I have no doubt that Pop would be pleased with my humble efforts. I began with only the faint childhood recollection from my father Clayton that the Riddlebargers originally came from Switzerland to America in the late 1700s and settled in Pennsylvania. As it turns out, this was pretty close to the mark. Going through family papers some time after my mother’s death in 1992, I found my grandmother iii Dine’s scrapbook, which turned out to be a treasure trove for tracing the family roots. From the faded and crumbling typescript of my great-grandfather Albert Emery Riddlebarger’s obituary and funeral service, I discovered that my great-great grandparents, David Henry and Elizabeth Garrison Riddlesbarger, had lived in Lee County, Illinois. I was perplexed and saddened by the fact that I had never heard of Albert Riddlebarger nor his parents David and Elizabeth, before finding the obituary. In fact, no one in our family could recall any of them, although Lynne McMahon had decoupaged pictures of them in her home given her by Dine many years before. Who were these people who died professing faith in Christ, and whose DNA was passed on to me and to my sons? It became my passion to get to know them as best I could and share that knowledge with others in the family so that their memory would not be lost to future Riddlebargers yet to come. Traditional genealogical research was largely a matter of spending hours in libraries pouring over published records, as well as sending query letters to various historical societies, county clerks, government agencies, and people with the same last name, looking for various bits of information. The worst part of this early phase of my research was waiting for a response. Patience was required every bit as much as was detective ingenuity. Many people that I contacted were very helpful, gladly sending copies of important documents and other historical materials. A few were completely indifferent and could have cared less. But families are like that. You take the good with the bad. But times have changed–as has genealogical research. With the advent of the Internet and the rise of on- line ancestry companies devoted to genealogical research (such as Ancestry.com), much of my own research became a matter of sending e-mail queries to various genealogical web-sites and searching through a seemingly endless mass of on-line cemetery records, deeds, obituaries, census data, and newspapers, as well as checking the query pages in those counties where our kin may have lived. The rise of modern search engines made it abundantly clear that no records existed for a “Riddlebarger family” in Europe–Switzerland, Germany, or Austria–the places you would expect someone with the surname of “Riddlebarger” to find ancestors. Since the searches came up empty, this meant our surname was Americanized at the time our forebears arrived in the New World. This was a potential brick wall. On-line searches did turn up Riddlebargers in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, and Illinois. My queries here were a bit more fruitful. E-mail correspondence with various genealogical/historical societies eventually turned up a core group of Riddlebarger family researchers—most of them previously unknown distant cousins—all trying to cover much of the same ground. Then came the advent of DNA testing which solved the biggest riddle of all–our family’s European roots. Little did I know when this project began, I would find the exact location of our family’s European origins (the Röthlisberg–a small hill–in Langnau im Emmental, in the Canton of Bern, Switzerland) and actually meet a living European cousin (Urs Rötlisperger). DNA testing provided answers impossible to find otherwise. But technological advances did not change the fact that finding the widely scattered traces of the history of our forebears is grounded in old-fashioned historical research, and then by carefully placing each puzzle piece of information together to see the larger picture. And like a jigsaw puzzle, the picture kept changing even while it was iv becoming clearer. It is interesting to go back and read my early correspondence with people to see where I was headed in the right direction and where I was dead wrong. There were many wonderful breakthroughs and many disappointing dead-ends. Help in uncovering our family history has come from a number of sources. After finding Albert Riddlebarger’s obituary, I first contacted the Lee County Genealogical Society in Dixon, Illinois, in June of 1997 and I was soon off and running. They quickly provided a great deal of information about David Henry, his father Daniel, as well as the Garrison family. I was now back six generations and could trace our kin as far back as Pennsylvania. I knew I was getting warm! Another big break came shortly after, when I found Dine’s address/date book for the year 1969. In the alphabetical listing in the phone directory were several Riddlebargers of whom I had never heard. There was also a return address sticker off a Christmas card from an “H. Riddlesberger” who lived in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, where I now suspected that Daniel Riddlesberger and his son David Henry had been born. This was too intriguing to let go by, so I did a quick Internet phone search and found a “John Henry Riddlesberger,” living nearby in Carlisle, PA. I wrote to him, waited several months for a reply but eventually forgot all about it. Then on Thanksgiving night 1997, I received an e-mail from John Henry, who informed me that his late grandfather “Henry” was the mysterious “H. Riddlesberger” living on Broad St. in Waynesboro, and that his grandfather had spent many years researching the Riddlesberger family! It was not long before John Henry and his brother Merchline Mills Jr., graciously sent me a copy of Henry’s extensive work on our family history (Henry’s “notes”) which filled in a great many holes in my research, and gave me names, dates, and anecdotal information about our family, which otherwise, I would never have discovered. To my utter amazement, Henry makes reference to correspondence in the 1930's and 50's with Glenn A. Riddlebarger, then of Artesia, which related to Pop’s research for his family history. Much of that correspondence was among the papers Lynne McMahon discovered. Henry and Glenn would be quite pleased, I think, that their grandsons collaborated in this effort over forty years later! Another big break came when the Vice-President of the Georgia Salzburger Society put me in touch with a Mr. Michael G. Moss, a descendant of the “Riddlespurger” family, widely scattered throughout the south. Mr. Moss was also investigating his possible connection to the “Riedelsperger” family who were among the “Salzburger” refugees, fleeing from Roman Catholic persecution in Austria, and who came to the New World, helping to found an historic Lutheran settlement at Ebenezer, Georgia in 1734. Mr. Moss, in turn, introduced me to Marie Kline, another Riddlespurger descendant who saved me much grief and great embarrassment.