In 1901 a retired Army surgeon in St. Louis, Dr. Noah M. Glatfelter, published the first full genealogy of the family — 861 households traced back to Casper Glattfelder, who stepped off a boat in Philadelphia in 1743. He did it on his own time, and it did something he never planned. It made scattered cousins curious about each other.

This episode is about what they did with that curiosity. A York county pastor named Adam Stump decided the family ought to gather, for no occasion in particular, and pulled in two cousins to help. They called themselves a self-constituted committee and held exactly zero meetings. They made their plans, in their own words, “as we chance to see each other” — a word on a street corner, a note passed along, a few minutes after church. Stump borrowed a Sunday school’s benches, hired a hay wagon to shuttle people up from the train, wrote a ten-verse hymn, and printed the whole plan in his church bulletin.

On September 8, 1906, an estimated 1,200 people turned out in a borrowed patch of woods near Loganville. The benches ran short. That shortage was the first proof the family wanted to be reassembled, and it is the reason the association, the park, and this newsletter exist today.

Whether your name is spelled Glattfelder, Glatfelter, Clodfelter, Gladfelter, or one of the other ways it has traveled, this is where the family sits down and talks about where it came from.

Read the full story: https://glattfelder.news/post/three-men-who-never-held-a-meeting

This episode is derived from the book The Early Glattfelder Family in America and The Casper Glattfelder Association of America: The First Hundred Years, pages 85–87. Buy your own copy at https://glattfelder.news/books/early-glattfelder.

From the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.

In 1901, a retired Army surgeon in St. Louis published a book nobody had asked him to write.

Noah Miller Glatfelter spent forty years as a doctor and decades of his spare time writing letters to relatives he’d never met, digging through church records, wills, and land deeds. What he produced was the first full account of this family: eight hundred and sixty-one families, traced all the way back to Casper Glattfelder, who stepped off a boat in Philadelphia in 1743. Nobody paid him. He did it because he knew that if he didn’t, the thread would break.

That book set everything in motion — the reunions, Heimwald Park on the hill above the old homestead, the patio bricks carrying thirteen hundred of our names.

The Glattfelder Gazette picks up where Noah left off. Every week we take one ancestor out of the records and tell their story the way you’d tell it across a kitchen table. Whether your name is spelled Glattfelder, Glatfelter, Clodfelter, Gladfelter, or any of the other ways it has traveled, this is where the family sits down and talks about where it came from.

The first story arrives July 25, 2026, and a new one follows every week.

Follow the show now, so the first one is waiting for you.

Read the full origin story: https://glattfelder.news/post/how-this-all-started

From the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.

When Casper Glattfelder's brother died near Basel in 1742, he left a widow, Salomea, and six children with no way to reach America. Casper already had his own wife, Elizabeth, and seven children of his own. He took all of them anyway — and in 1743 carried two families across the Atlantic on a single ship, the Francis and Elizabeth.

Almost every name this family wears in America rode on that one decision. This is the story of the crossing that made the rest possible.

Read this story: glattfelder.news/gazette/the-francis-and-elizabeth

If you enjoy these stories, please share them with your family and subscribe to the Glattfelder Gazette to get each new one free.

The Glattfelder Gazette · Season 1, Episode 2 · A publication of the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.

In 1742, a Swiss farmer named Hans Peter Glattfelder sold everything, gathered six families, and set out to take his wife and six children across an ocean to America. He died near Basel, before they reached the open water — and the family turned back, against the current of everything they had planned, to bury him at home.

This is the story of how the American branch of the Glattfelder family nearly ended before it began, and the one decision, by one other person, that kept it alive.

Read this story: glattfelder.news/gazette/the-man-who-died-at-basel

If you enjoy these stories, please share them with your family and subscribe to the Glattfelder Gazette to get each new one free.

The Glattfelder Gazette · Season 1, Episode 1 · A publication of the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.

Somewhere on a road between Virginia and Indiana, around 1832, a girl lost her bonnet. Hundreds of us are here because of what happened next.

That’s the kind of story the Glattfelder Gazette tells. Every week we take one ancestor out of the reunion programs, the family histories, and the letters nobody had opened in decades, and we tell their story the way you’d tell it across a kitchen table. Not a lecture. Not a museum tour.

Whether your name is spelled Glattfelder, Glatfelter, Clodfelter, Gladfelter, or any of the other ways it has traveled, this is where the family sits down and talks about where it came from.

The first episode arrives July 25, 2026, and a new story follows every week.

Follow the show now, so the first one is waiting for you.

From the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.

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