Ancestral Home of Hazelbaker Family in PA
Wanted: Hazelbaker Volunteers.
Ancestry.com sent me an e-mail telling of the availability of old land maps. Just for a quick experiment I looked for Hazelbakers in Pennsylvania. Up popped a wonderful old map and business directory from 1876. The business directory lists six Hazelbakers. I do not dare divert myself from my current work to extract the maximum information from these documents. Those of you with knowledge of the old names will recognize some of the families that the Hazelbakers married with. It is no accident that one of the progeny of George Hazelbaker married a woman named Crow. Their farms were adjacent!
I hope that one of you full-blooded Hazelbakers will accept the challenge of analyzing these documents for the rest of us. I will post your work on these pages. Please contact me and tell me of your interest. If more than one of you respond, we should find some way to collaborate on the work. For your interest, here are high resolution versions of the Map (1.5 MB) and the Directory (950 KB) that you may download, save,and work with locally. (Right click to save to your computer directly.)
Notice that the direction of North on the map is not straight up. Additionally, the location of the cemetery containing the remains of Peter Hazelbaker and his infant son Peter can be localized to the area near the name Henry Spahr in the middle of the map. You can use Google Map with its satellite and terrain features to find the exact location of the old Spahr farm where Peter is buried. (See also the discovery of Craig Hazelbaker.) New high-resolution satellite photographs show the actual tombstones.
Business Directory
Here is a detail from the directory listing 6 Hazelbakers. Download the full version to see other family names you will recognize.
Surely everything there is to know abut the old Hazelbakers has not yet been found! What other maps might we look for? Peter's Father-in-Law bought land not far from Allen Township. What was the location?
I add this call for volunteers to my general request for individuals to prepare a broad variety of additions for this site. The materials added by Jill Foley, Jack White, Greg Humphrey, Mark Hazelbaker, and Craig Hazelbaker have been absolutely spectacular. Why not write up a history of your corrner of the family, or share old historical materials that you might have.?
For your interest, here is a screen shot of 3 other Hazelbakers for which land maps like the one above are available.