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This work is dedicated to two men who, at different times and in very different ways, asked me and helped me answer the same question, Who am I? As with any historical study, the answer to that question is incomplete.

At the 1996 Schenck reunion, I mentioned to my mother's brother, David Andrew Holter, that it seemed like the whole town (Howard, PA) was there. I don't remember what we had been talking about but the conversation quickly changed to family history and he told me that he could help me get started. Several weeks later he showed me a book of Holter genealogy. I had no idea what I was getting into but there it was laid out in black and white, two hundred years of detailed listings telling me why the whole town was at the reunion. I was hooked. We had several picture identification sessions before he died in 2003. I enjoyed each one.

Being the youngest of three children, I inherited all of the boxes of "stuff" that my parents had collected over the years but I had never really taken the time to explore. What a treasure trove!

A few years later when internet genealogy was taking off and I had a little experience, I received an email message from a man named Karl.

"I entered my name in a search on Rootsweb and your name came up. I was born in Iowa but my grandfather was from Pennsylvania. We used to visit my cousin Glenn around Lancaster but he was a lot older than me."

He listed his parents names and dates and he ended his message with,

"I know that's not much but I hope you can help me find my family."

I never met my cousin Karl Andreas Hirlinger but I got to know him over the next six years. Before he died in 2005, I passed along almost 200 years of our shared history just as my Uncle David had done for me.

This isn't just my ancestors. Sometimes it is a cousin but often it might be a second cousin's mother-in-law's uncle and often beyond that. More importantly, it is family!

This is a work in progress. It has been a struggle sometimes. I've switched from paper to computer, three different genealogy programs, the move from Windows to a Mac and now data can be syncronized with Ancestry, FamilySearch and other sites. The original hand written family tree data that I started from goes back more than a hundred years and comes from five relatives, all long gone, from both sides.

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