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.