Glattfelder Gazette

Most immigrants spent months, even years, drifting before they settled. Casper Glattfelder bought a farm before he had been in America two weeks. On September 13, 1743, still sick and freshly bereaved, he and his brother-in-law Henry Walter signed a mortgage for 224 acres along the Conewago creek. They did not have the money. Almost nobody did.

Then he found out what he had bought. The land carried a heavy debt to a powerful Philadelphia official, too few German neighbors, and, in the family’s telling, hills that never looked like home. Three years later Casper sold it for 67 pounds, a few shillings more than he had paid. All that work, and he walked away with essentially nothing.

He did not call it failure. He called it the wrong farm, which is a different thing, and moved south to better ground. That willingness to admit a fast decision was wrong, cut the loss, and choose again is the reason the family that came after grew from his second choice, not his first — and most of them never knew there had been a first.

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/two-weeks-to-a-farm

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 5–8 and 39–40. Buy your own copy at https://glattfelder.news/books/early-glattfelder.

From the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.

Family tradition says it was Elizabeth, not Casper, who pushed to leave Switzerland — and it says why. She did not want her sons conscripted and sold into foreign wars. Eighteenth-century Switzerland rented out its young men by the regiment, France above all. The pay came home. The men often did not.

She had reason to guard the sons she had left. Over eleven years Elizabeth bore seven children and buried three of them as infants, including a first Salomon whose name she gave again to the next boy. By the time she packed for America she had stood at the edge of three small graves. She was not going to lose the rest to a recruiter’s ledger.

Elizabeth got her family onto the Francis and Elizabeth at Rotterdam. Somewhere on the crossing, or in the first raw days after Philadelphia, she died, along with the baby John. She never saw America. But not one of her surviving sons was ever sold to a war. She bought that outcome with her life and never lived to know she had won.

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/why-elizabeth-wanted-to-leave

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 3–4 and 9–10. Buy your own copy at https://glattfelder.news/books/early-glattfelder.

From the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.

On August 30, 1743, a Philadelphia clerk worked down a list of newly arrived foreigners, taking each man’s oath. Beside the name he wrote as “Gasper Gladfelter,” he added one small notation: the man was sick that day. That is the first written record of Casper Glattfelder in America. Nearly everyone reading this descends from him.

He had earned that misery. Casper left Glattfelden, near Zurich, in the spring of 1743 with his wife Elizabeth, her seventy-year-old father, and four children — part of a convoy of six families from one small parish. The crossing on the Francis and Elizabeth took the better part of three months. It cost him Elizabeth’s father, almost certainly buried at sea, and very likely Elizabeth herself and their infant son John, who both vanish from the record right here.

So the founder of a family that now numbers more than fifty thousand began his American life sick, grieving, and alone with four children. He raised his hand, swore allegiance to a king he had never seen, and went to work. Within two weeks he had bought land. He remarried, fathered six sons, and started over from almost nothing.

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/the-man-who-was-sick-the-day-he-landed

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 4–6 and 9–10. 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, 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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