Connecting William Trautman of Berks County to his son Peter Trautman of Somerset County PA, DAR style!

Somerset County, Pennsylvania.

I've written a lot about Peter Trautman, also spelled Troutman, who is one of my DAR ancestors, meaning that he served in the Revolutionary War. Now I want to connect him to his father William Trautman.

When I started doing genealogy back about 10 years ago, my personal proof standard was haphazard at best. If I saw it in a tree of someone I knew and trusted, or if Mom had found her proof, then it was good enough for me! Access to records back when Mom started doing genealogy in the early 1970s, was difficult to come by. Luckily, she lived in the geographic center of the locations of most all of our ancestors so if she took a day trip, she could find a lot of documents. When I look at her notes now, much of what I find on Ancestry using the general search function was already found by her. She collected binders full of census records form the early 1790 census to about 1880 for the counties circling our primary locations of interest. She was a non-stop collector of records! She even had at home rolls of microfilm and a reader!!

I've mentioned before about her correspondences with fellow genealogists across the country. She'd evaluate their skills and then share what she could and received whatever they had. It was a slow painstaking process helped along by the message boards. And once she had vetted the correspondent, she used what they sent.

Now, we work off of original records and I'm busy updating the Big Tree she built out over the decades with the best records I can find. It's a slow process but it will be worth it.

I mention all of this because I see this history of The Way We Worked in the DAR Ancestor records. Applications from the earliest time - about 1900 - contain little data and you're lucky to get names and dates. The applications, which are all available on the DAR website at DAR.org under Genealogy along with much else, from the middle of the 20th Century have names, dates, and places and sources. If you are applying today one of the tasks will be to make sure that your application brings with it the most updated information possible. And we're all held to rigorous standards.

So, now on to the Trautman father and son. At some point "proving" my lineal connection to Peter Trautman I realized that his father Wilhelm or William Trautman was also listed as a DAR patriot! But... they were not connected, and in other words, no one who descended from Peter had also made a supplemental or additional application proving their lineal descent from William! Whoopie! I could do that!

So off I went, knowing that I'd already proven my descent from Peter, and set out to prove Peter's connection to William as his son. Sounded easy enough.

So what sort of documents might prove that connection? What would you look for? How about a birth record, or a church baptismal record? That would work, wouldn't it? Hmmm. Peter was born in Berks County, PA, and that was already in the DAR records for him, so I checked FamilySearch Wiki to see what they said about birth or baptism records there. Nothing panned out there or anywhere else I looked, and believe me, I looked. Next stop: what other records would prove a father-son connection?

How about will and probate records? Yup! I have William's will and it names Peter as his oldest son. Got that from FamilySearch. It was written in English and German and probated in February 1790. I even have a transcription from a Trautman cousin years ago, so I wouldn't have to transcribe the whole thing for the DAR application, but would have to check that transcription for accuracy. Easy enough.

But I wasn't going to submit that will alone! I also needed to prove that my Peter Trautman was indeed the one and only Peter Trautman who was born in Berks County and moved to Bedford County that later became Somerset County. How was I going to do that?

I checked all the census and tax rolls for both counties for a William Trautman and a Peter Trautman. The point of this is to prove that there was only one William Trautman and only one Peter Trautman in that location at that time. There is also a William Trautman Jr., son of William Sr. and he's mentioned in the will too as one of the administrators, so that's confusing. Here's what I found, below, and as you can see, while it provided some useful bits that could fill out a timeline, it's not conclusive when it comes to proving a father-son relationship. William Sr. died in berks Co. in 1790.

Census: Year/ County	Peter Trautman	William Trautman
1768 Proprietary Return for the County of Berks for the year 1768		Listed as carpenter. This is William Sr. because Jr was born in 1763. No other William Trautman listed.
1783 PA Supply Tax, Bedford Co PA	no	no
1788 tax and exoneration for Londonderry, Bedford Co	Yes	no
US 1790, Bedford, Berks.	no	no
US 1790, any PA	no	no
1793 Tax Assessment, Bedford Co	yes	yes
Pennsylvania, U.S. Direct Tax Lists, 1798	Londonderry, Bedford Co	Londonderry, Bedford Co
US 1800	Londonderry, Somerset, Pennsylvania	none
PA Septennial Census 1800	Londonderry, Somerset, Pennsylvania	Londonderry, Somerset, Pennsylvania
US 1810	Southampton, Somerset, Pennsylvania	Southampton, Somerset, Pennsylvania

Next, I double-checked Peter's military file on Fold3 and his pension application. There was a nice note from his brother William Jr. vouching for him. William lived in Somerset County. So there was a useful location there. And Peter's pension file stated numerously that he served from Berks County, and that would substantiate the Berks / Somerset connection. But where was the father, William Sr.? Not there. Keep looking.

I've found that land records can be a girl genealogists best friend, and they were here too, but I wasn't too optimistic at first. You see Peter received land in Somerset County through the process of Bounty Land for service in the Revolutionary War from the state of Pennsylvania, so he probably didn't get any land from his father as the first son. And in looking at the chart above, you can see that Peter was in Bedford Co. in 1788. But I thought of land records anyway.

I retraced my steps through the DAR records and applications for William Sr. and Peter. I asked for help in a Facebook group devoted to helping other members work up their lineage. An angel came forward and said that there was reference to a deed in Deed Book 11, Berks County, that named Peter Trautman and also mentioned William Sr. as his father!! Oh joy!

Yes, and there it was. Just as promised. I had already searched the Berks County Recorder's Office online and not found any results for Trautman or Troutman, but it was there just the same. Probably operator error.

It's a beautiful thing, that deed! In it Peter sells his interest in his father's estate. It names as his father as William Trautman of Greenwich Township, Berks County. And it also stated that the grantor is Peter Trautman of Bedford County, later Somerset County. To my eyes, it's a beautiful document!

So there is was. I had the will and I had the deed. I also had the DAR listing for both William Trautman and Peter Trautman, and the dates and places line up perfectly! A triangulation: three documents that prove the same conclusion.

Next step, filling out the paperwork to prove my lineage from myself to William Trautman born in Germany and died in Berks County, PA, who is a DAR patriot because he took the Oath of Allegiance in 1788. Good man.

 

Deed

Will

 

 

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