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My name is Ronald Paul O’Ronald Stauffer. I’m an American, born in California in 1985. I now live in Colorado with my wife and five children. I am a citizen of both America and Ireland. My family is of German and Irish descent.
My father’s father’s family, the Stauffers, are of German origin. They immigrated to America via Switzerland around the late 1700s. They established themselves in Pennsylvania, in Hatfield, where English-speaking Americans mistakenly called them “Pennsylvania Dutch” after hearing they came from “Deutschland.” (Yes, fans of “The Office,” think of Dwight Schrute and you’re right on track).
The Stauffers were followers of Menno Simmons, also known as “Mennonites,” and lived quiet lives of self-sufficiency by hunting and farming. Many of them lived their entire lives without ever leaving the county they were born in.
My father’s mother’s family, the McElwees, are from Ireland. They came to America more recently (circa late 1800s – early 1900s). They also came to Pennsylvania. Some spoke English, some only spoke Irish Gaelic. They were Irish Catholic, and generally worked hard labor jobs (such as coal mining and railroading) in small mountain towns. Some eventually moved to Philadelphia.
Over the past few years, I have had a slow-burning genealogical itch, wanting to piece together exactly how it was my family came to America, who they were, why they came here, when they came, and all the other facts related to their immigration. As I’ve been working on finishing a college degree (which has taken me 16 years to complete, as I run my own business and raise my children), I had to pick a capstone project for my very last semester (Spring 2019).
My major is Storytelling, and as I enrolled in my COM 4790 class (“Senior Seminar in Technical Communication”) at Metro State University, I spent a few weeks pondering exactly what I wanted my to showcase in my very last class. After reviewing the things I had written in the past for school, and the things I’ve studied outside of school that have interested me, I decided that the best story I could tell as a senior was “the story of me.” More specifically, that meant discovering where my family came from, who they were, and how I came to be.
About two years ago, I spent a few evenings at my grandparents’ house, and we stayed up late by the fireplace, enjoying some wine and sharing family tales. At one point during my stay, I realized: “I have a limited window of opportunity here: real, live family members from a previous generation who remember people in my family’s past who I will never get to know because they are long gone. I should take advantage of this before time runs out.” When I was picking my senior project, I realized that I could kill two birds with one stone: both research my family history and tell the story for my capstone.
As much as I identify strongly with the German side of my family (and my wife could tell you—I have very strong German tendencies), the fact that their historical records are so neatly organized in a tight-knit community in the Hatfield area where I’ve been told the last name “Stauffer” is as common as “Yoder,” made me decide that I could follow up that side of the family at a later date. The records are much better on the Stauffer side of the family and I don’t feel that uncovering our past in Hatfield is very time-sensitive. But the conversations I had with my grandmother (“Grammy,” as I’ve always called her), made me feel a certain sense of urgency to pursue the Irish side of my story.
This website is the result of this effort. I decided to make my senior project focus on the following: “A journey to discover my family’s first-generation Irish immigrant ancestors that came to America.” My goal with this project was to find out the answers to a few very specific questions:
- Who exactly were the first-generation immigrants?
- What was their experience like?
- When exactly did they come to America?
- Where did they come from in Ireland, and where did they end up in America?
- Why did they choose to come here in the first place?
- How were they able to accomplish something so ambitious?
The “family lore” I had heard over the years at reunions and get-togethers was not enough to satisfy my curiosity. “We got kicked out of Ireland for stealing pigs,” is something my great-grandfather apparently said at one point in time. “My family was from Tipp’ry,” is something my great-grandmother apparently told my father before she passed away. “Coal-cracker country” in northern Pennsylvania is where I heard my great-grandfather’s family chose to live. “One of them would come home covered in black from head to toe in coal dust, and the other covered in white from lye” one family member told me.
These stories, while absolutely fascinating, also frustrated me: I wanted to know more: were they true? Were they legends? Where is “coal cracker country,” and why haven’t I ever been there? What is coal dust exactly? Does “Tipp’ry” actually mean County Tipperary? Did we really steal pigs?
I was determined to find answers to these questions, and more. My final project for my degree will hopefully, if nothing else, help my own family learn more and discover who we are, where we came from, and why that matters.
I have tried to catalog as much as I can for the efforts, including audio clips, photos, maps, interviews, charts, videos, text, screen shots, scans of historical documents, and more, to try to help tell the story of my search for those in my family members who made the daunting trip across the ocean from the Emerald Isle to the Land of Opportunity.
Thanks for reading.
-Ron Stauffer (04/25/19)
“At that time the Irish were much disliked in America. They were looked upon with contempt, particularly on the East Coast.”
“When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.“
“Girl wanted: In a small private family – a young girl, 14 or 15 years old, either American or German to take care of a young child. She must have good references. Wages $3 a month. No Irish need apply. Call at No. 89 McDougal St.”
“It’s not enough to be American. You always have to be something else, Irish-American, German-American, and you’d wonder how they’d get along if someone hadn’t invented the hyphen.”