We’re taking a little hop across the pond to start connecting the dots between Scherschels on a couple continents. Since the Scherschel family arrival on North American shores in the 1830s, our related branches of distant cousins continued their lineage in central Europe and also moved elsewhere like Oceania. We’re starting introductions and invitations to our relations over there who descend from the same ancestral line as Scherschel in the Americas. Recently several relations from Europe who share our common ancestral line from Germany have also joined Scherschel Legacy. And we extend a most warm welcome to all of them as we keep linking the dynasty together across the world by including them in the bigger picture of the family. Some pics of our current living cousins outside of North America and a little bit about them is here in the link to the Facebook post:
Scherschel Legacy Global Invitation
As luck would have it, the Scherschel family bible (from the Joseph Rudolph Scherschel, Indiana branch/Volume 2 of the genealogy books) had a photo of one of the cousins who grew up and remained in Saarland, Germany in the immediate decades after parts of the Scherschel family immigrated to America in 1837. Though it still remains to identify who this German ancestor was by name from the mid to late 1800s, his photo is shown in the Facebook post and placed side by side to his American counterpart. For comparison’s sake and if you look close, you can see the similarity in the facial and genetic features between the two cousins of that era (the Scherschel cousin from Germany and Frederick Paul Scherschel from Bedford, Indiana, USA). It’s unknown if these two cousins were the same generation. If not they were at most one generation apart based on the wardrobe and hairstyles of the time.
There were many more cousins (especially of the maternal lines) from the early 1800s who remained in Germany and Alsace-Lorraine when the family divided between the two continents. How heartening it is to see so many Scherschels still descended and living in the same areas of Saarland, Germany and Alsace-Lorraine, France where we all originated from. The global cousins shown in the Facebook post live near Saarland and Rhineland, Germany or Lorraine, France (which were one administrative region several centuries ago) and have shown their direct ancestors to be from those areas. This world truly is smaller than we often think. We’re blessed today in the 21st century that technology now gives us greater ease to find one another and stay together.
