Sarah Levan’s Quilt
A distant cousin’s Facebook post lead to the discovery of a family heirloom quilt. This presentation tells the story of Sarah Levan’s 1857 applique quilt and the genealogical history it reveals. The quilt is one of fewer than a dozen known quilts inscribed in Fraktur script by a professional scrivener or calligrapher. These quilts have been found only in the Pennsylvania German area of east central Pennsylvania, where scriveners were primarily employed to hand letter and decorate Taufscheine (baptismal certificates) and other documents. Studying the names inscribed on the quilt blocks illustrates how a French Huguenot family became Pennsylvania Dutch.
Wendy Dillenschneider Bio
Wendy Dillenschneider began tracing her family tree 35 years ago when she was living in Munich, Germany. She figured that “Dillenschneider” had to be a German name, so she started looking up the name in phone books at the post office. She didn’t find any family in Germany, but she finally located them in Alsace.
Decades later, working out of her ranch on the western slopes of Pikes Peak, Wendy has extended her family tree using online resources for both domestic and foreign research. She is adept at research in Pennsylvania, where her family settled in the United States. She is collaborating with a cousin in Alsace to trace the migration of Dillenschneiders from Alsace to America.
Wendy and her husband, Greg, added genetic genealogy or DNA testing to their genealogy toolkit in 2013 and have since immersed themselves in the details of DNA tests and evaluation methods. They have answered several questions about their family history using DNA evidence.