Glattfelder Gazette

About Glattfelder Gazette

The Glattfelder Gazette is a free weekly email newsletter and accompanying podcast that tells the story of the Glattfelder family — one short, readable story at a time. Each issue delivers a single story drawn from more than 280 years of family history, designed to be read in about five minutes. It's not a genealogy database or a research journal. It's a storytelling vehicle designed to reach the thousands of Glattfelder descendants — many of whom carry different last names and have no idea how deep their family's story goes — and give them a reason to care about where they come from.

Publisher

Casper Glattfelder Association of America

Category

business · history

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

30 Jun 2026

Latest episode

7 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

12 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   7 Oct 2026

   Fifty-Five Grandchildren

   When Casper Glattfelder died in the early spring of 1775, he had fifty-five grandchildren. He had met five or six of them. The rest arrived after he was gone. The man who started this entire American family never got to see the family he started. Six sons who lived to raise families became fifty-five grandchildren the record can name, and the line has not stopped multiplying since. His last surviving grandchild, Catharine, died in Ohio in 1887 at ninety-two — a hundred and twelve years after Casper was in the ground, in a state that was wilderness when he died. Today more than fifty thousand of his descendants are alive across the continent, under a dozen spellings of his name. Casper saw almost none of it. He measured his decision to leave Switzerland against a sick crossing, a dead wife, a wrong farm, and twenty hard years of clearing ground. The jury was still out when he died. The verdict is us, and he never got to read it. Most of the people who decide the shape of a family never live to see the shape it takes. 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/fifty-five-grandchildren 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 12–13. Buy your own copy at https://glattfelder.news/books/early-glattfelder. From the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.

2. 

   30 Sept 2026

   Squatters for Twenty Years

   When a surveyor finally measured Casper Glattfelder’s farm in 1770, he noted it had been improved for about twenty years — cleared, fenced, built on, worked hard. And in all that time Casper had never legally owned a foot of it. He and Henry Walter were, in the family historian’s blunt phrase, pure-and-simple squatters. It was not carelessness or poverty. Penn land was cheap, and plenty of honest families lived the same way, working unclaimed ground for years before bothering with the paperwork. Casper died in 1775 without ever holding a clear deed to the farm he had worked for nearly thirty years. Here is what complicates the picture. The same man who would not file his own land warrant made the trip to Philadelphia to become a naturalized citizen, served as road supervisor and constable, helped organize his church, and built a neighbor’s coffin when the man died. He let the paperwork that protected only himself slide. The obligations that bound him to his neighbors, he met every time. Live now, file later — but pay what you owe the people around you. 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/squatters-for-twenty-years 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 7–9 and 43. Buy your own copy at https://glattfelder.news/books/early-glattfelder. From the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.

3. 

   23 Sept 2026

   The Place That Looked Like Home

   When Casper Glattfelder sold his first American farm in 1746, he did not sell it because it had failed. He sold it, the family has always said, because it did not look like home. So he went looking for ground that did. He and Henry Walter moved south, turned down one tract over timber too heavy to clear, and kept going up the south branch of the Codorus until they reached a valley that seemed just right. Casper took the west side of the creek, Henry the east, their kinsman Hildebrand just beyond. Three families from Glattfelden rebuilt the cluster of neighbors, land, and church they had left in Switzerland. Family members who have since traveled back to the old Swiss village keep coming home and saying the same thing: the country there looks like the homestead along the Codorus. Casper had every practical reason to grab the nearest decent field and never move again. Instead, carrying his losses and four motherless children, he kept walking until he found the hillside that felt like his. A century later the railroad ran a line through that valley and named the stop Glatfelter’s Station. His name is still on that ground, which tells you he chose right. 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-place-that-looked-like-home 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 7 and 40–41. Buy your own copy at https://glattfelder.news/books/early-glattfelder. From the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.

4. 

   16 Sept 2026

   Lifted Up and Dropped Into Destruction

   About noon on March 21, 1976, a tornado skipped across York County and found the family’s 63-year-old pavilion at Heimwald. The York Daily Record said the winds picked it up and dropped it into destruction. The phrase turned out to be precise. A 1934 repair had left the roof resting on its posts, held down by nothing but its own weight. For forty-two years that was good enough. It took a tornado to find the shortcut. Then the directors faced the question every wrecked thing forces: rebuild at what size? Grief and pride both said put it back full size. The numbers said they could not afford it. So they built a smaller pavilion for $8,600, paid with insurance and about fifty family gifts, without a cent of debt. That was the wise, unsentimental choice. Smaller and standing beats grand and gone. As the family’s finances recovered through the 1980s, the directors restored the pavilion to its full original size and rededicated it. The full pavilion the family meets under today exists only because their grandparents were willing, for a while, to settle for less. 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/lifted-up-and-dropped-into-destruction 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 133–134. Buy your own copy at https://glattfelder.news/books/early-glattfelder. From the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.

5. 

   9 Sept 2026

   Should We Give It a Decent Burial?

   In 1966 a new president opened his term with a question almost no leader will ask out loud: if the reunion was dying, would it not be decent to give it a proper burial? It was a fair question. Attendance had fallen from more than 300 in the early 1950s to about 120 a decade later, and the two veterans carrying the association had told a reporter they were not sure it could last. The board took the question seriously. One director suggested handing Heimwald Park over to the county. Instead, early in 1967, they chose to keep going — and backed the choice with something concrete: an endowment to keep the park in repair no matter how thin any single year ran. The first year brought in about $1,500. It did not reach its modest $10,000 goal until 1984, seventeen years later. No single gift saved the reunion. What saved it was a discouraged board on a bad day deciding the family was worth more trouble than it was worth abandoning, and then doing the slow, dull work for a generation before anyone could be sure it would hold. 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/should-we-give-it-a-decent-burial 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 125–127. Buy your own copy at https://glattfelder.news/books/early-glattfelder. From the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.

6. 

   2 Sept 2026

   One of the First Incorporated Families in America

   On October 3, 1910, a York County court granted a charter to the Casper Glattfelder Association of America, and a family became a corporation — a legal person that could own property, sign contracts, and outlive everyone who created it. That was close to unheard of. The newspapers called them one of the first families in the country to do it. They did it to solve a plain problem. Two reunions in, the family was meeting every August on land it did not own, and when the borrowed grove was sold out from under them, they decided to stop depending on anyone’s goodwill. A handshake committee cannot hold a deed. A chartered corporation can. Within three years they bought the ground overlooking the old homestead that the family still gathers on today. Of the seventeen men who signed the charter, nine died still in office, the last of them in the 1940s. The association did not die with them. That was the whole point. They understood that enthusiasm fades and founders die, so they built a body that did not depend on any one person staying alive or interested. It is still standing. 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/one-of-the-first-incorporated-families-in-america 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 91–93. Buy your own copy at https://glattfelder.news/books/early-glattfelder. From the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.

7. 

   26 Aug 2026

   The Brother Who Died Before the Border

   Before Casper ever set out for America, his older brother tried to go first. John Peter Glattfelder decided in 1742 to take his wife and six children to Pennsylvania. He died that spring, before the party had even crossed the Swiss border. His family carried his body home and buried him in the town he had been trying to leave. His widow, Salomea, crossed anyway. A year later she gathered the six children, the youngest not quite two, and sailed with Casper’s group. What became of her, the record will not say. But her children left clear tracks, and the tracks run south — into the Carolina and Virginia back country, where over the generations the name settled into a spelling most of them no longer recognized: Clodfelter. For years nobody could prove the link. In 1912 the family historian stood up at a reunion and announced he had found it beyond a doubt. The southern Clodfelters descend from John Peter, the brother who died at the border. He failed at the one thing he set out to do, and thousands of people are alive today because of the journey he planned and never took. 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-brother-who-died-before-the-border 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 4–5 and 15–16. Buy your own copy at https://glattfelder.news/books/early-glattfelder. From the Casper Glattfelder Association of America.

8. 

   19 Aug 2026

   Two Weeks to a Farm

   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.

9. 

   12 Aug 2026

   Why Elizabeth Wanted to Leave

   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.

10. 

    5 Aug 2026

    The Man Who Was Sick the Day He Landed

    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.

11. 

    29 Jul 2026

    Three Men Who Never Held a Meeting

    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.

12. 

    30 Jun 2026

    Introducing the Glattfelder Gazette

    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.

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