M O W E R F A M I L Y N E W S L E T T E R

SEPTEMBER 1990

What a great month for genealogy! I am excited about the prospects for the future as we organize with other branches of the family to work on our Mower family history.

I received a call from Amy Mower Casto this last week and was invited to go to Salt Lake and speak to the Sydney Mower Family Reunion, which Tedi Jeen and I did. Shirley Wall was also there and spoke to the group. Their association has hired a genealogist in the past, a Mrs. Triptow, who has substantiated the same information that Tedi Jeen and I discovered regarding the birthplace and parents of Andrew Mower. Thus we have two verifications that our information about Andrew Maurer is correct. You should correct your family group sheets regarding Andrew. If you have a group sheet that shows his line as coming from a New Jersey Moor family, that information is in error and should be disregarded.

Mrs. Triptow, the Sydney Mower group genealogist, called me last week and we visited extensively about her research. She was amazed that we discovered the truth about Andrew Mower in about 3 months, and she spent about 2 years doing it. I told her that the family has been stuck on Andrew for 100 years.

Mrs. Triptow said that she felt she was at the end of her expertise and was going to bow out of the Maurer research. She feels the line is headed for Germany and she can not do that part of the work. Mrs. Triptow met our genealogist, Jim Petty, at the FHL and passed on to him her files, for which he was most grateful. She felt Jim does have the expertise we need.

Jim told Mrs. Triptow that he has written to a genealogist in Germany to begin a European phase of the research. We are going to try and locate Michael Maurer in Germany, because we think he was the first Maurer of our line to immigrate to the USA. We are also looking for Brills because the two families were linked closely in the US. They may have had connections in Germany before immigrating. The German genealogist will be charging us for time spent in Germany researching the records, but this is something we can not do ourselves. Your financial help will be appreciated to help fund this.

The Sydney Mower Association voted to join us in the research efforts. They will be co-ordinating through Amy's daughter, La Juan Johnson. I will be working closely with them to co-ordinate what we are doing.

We now have 3 Mower families working on this reseach---The John Albert Mower line ( Shirley Wall's family), The John L. Mower line (my line), and the Sydney Mower line (Amy Mower Casto's line). These 3 lines are all sons of Henry Mower Jr., so we all go back through Henry Mower Sr. and Mary Amick. The great thing about this is we can work through the same genealogist and better spend our money.

Shirley, Tedi Jeen and I are working diligently on the Amick, Mower, and Geissinger lines. We just keep plugging away and we are making progress.

Tedi Jeen and I are spending evenings learning German script writing. Oh, this is hard!! We are learning it however and I am finding my German background is useful. Thanks for your support!