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S01:E25
Vanita Johnson Engelbrecht died in the small hours of August 30, 2026. She was the author’s father’s eighth cousin, and this episode is told in her honor: the story of the Germans of northwestern New Jersey, and of the fence line on Schooley’s Mountain where an English dissenting family and a German immigrant family became kin.
In December 1748 Robert Collver — son of the Rogerene migration’s patriarch — bought the mountain farm that Chambers, the historian of the New Jersey Germans, situates in five words: “265 acres west of Henn.” Within a few years Robert’s daughter Esther married Jacob Hann, the neighbors’ son — the family’s first German marriage, and the one that ran farthest: down through Pleasant Grove, Newton, and Oneida, New York, into a Lutheran line that has given the church a study-Bible editor, a deaconess, and — in the author’s own congregation at Troy, Illinois — the newest child of Esther’s line, baptized in 2026.
Along the way: the Winthrop legend both families inherited, a small discovery in an 1895 genealogy that turns a family-tree link into a printed one, and a sliver of chromosome 13 that survived nine generations on each side of the fence.
Text, sources, and notes at history.collver.biz.