Where Did THAT Name Come From?

My maternal grandmother’s father was named Samuel Shiffeler (sometimes spelled “Shiffler”) Hergesheimer, and he named his youngest child Herbert Shiffeler Hergesheimer. That middle name—pretty clearly a surname-- has always been a curiosity to Samuel’s descendants.  Generally, a surname used as a middle name preserves a mother's maiden name or an ancestral surname.  This is not the case for Samuel; no one with the last name of "Shiffeler", "Shiffler" or anything approximating that name has been found in my maternal family tree.  Was Samuel's middle name chosen in admiration of someone unrelated?  This is so with Ferdinand Comfort Sommer, whose middle name honored Samuel Comfort who had been very helpful to Ferdinand's father, Dr. Henry Joseph Sommer, when he served as the American Consul to Bombay. (See “How Grandfather Went Out to India”.)

In one of those serendipities that often occur to family researchers, I might have stumbled on the origin of great-grandfather’s middle name. In 2008, I read about an incident in Philadelphia history* of which I had been unaware. It seems that in 1844, the City of Brotherly Love was the site of two of the deadliest religious and ethnic riots to ever occur in the United States! Named “The Bible Riots” by the Philadelphia press, the first riot began on May 6, 1844 in the industrialized Kensington district where large numbers of recent Irish immigrants had settled. The riot lasted three days and resulted in nine fatalities, dozens of wounded, and the destruction by fire of numerous homes, two Catholic churches, and a convent.

Samuel Shiffler Hergesheimer’s father, Samuel Hergesheimer, and his wife, Mary Ann Mower, might have been living in Kensington when the rioting broke out. (They were enumerated in Kensington in the 1850 U.S. census.) Alternately, they might have been living in the Northern Liberties district which borders Kensington on the south. Samuel was probably born in Unincorporated Northern Liberties in 1811; his mother, Catherine (Wurfel) Hergesheimer was still living there at the time of the riots.

Samuel Hergesheimer, a carpenter, was the grandson of a German immigrant. He and his wife were Protestants: Samuel and Mary Ann were married in the German Reformed Church (also called the Market Square Church) in Germantown in 1841, and Samuel is buried in the Roxboro Baptist Burying Grounds. As a Protestant tradesman, Samuel was likely a “nativist”, a native-born American who resented the recent huge influx of Irish Catholics into the Philadelphia area. The resentment was fueled by the usual fear that immigrants would take jobs from native-born Americans by working for cheaper wages, and that their growing numbers would overwhelm and eventually overturn the existing social norms and values.

When the Catholic bishop of Philadelphia, Francis Patrick Kenrick, called upon school officials to abide by the freedom of religion clause of Pennsylvania's constitution (which guaranteed no preference would be given to any religious establishment in public institutions), he intended to put a stop to the required daily reading of the King James Bible in the public schools. The mandated use of a Protestant Bible and the accompanying requirement to participate in Protestant prayer, said Bishop Kenrick, amounted to imposing a particular religious view on all students, and was, therefore, unconstitutional. For the record, the bishop wasn’t opposed to Bible-reading or prayer in public schools. He reasonably asked that the schools allow Catholic children to read the Douay version of the Bible and be excused from Protestant prayer.

Nativists, however, hostile to the Roman Catholic Church in general, and to its Irish adherents specifically, became hysterical, claiming the bishop wanted to throw the Bible and prayer out of the public schools entirely. In truth, the nativists, most of them hurting from an economic depression that gone on since 1837, were spoiling for a fight, and the bishop had inadvertently given them an excuse to attack, literally, Catholic churches and Irish immigrants. On May 6, 1844, 3000 nativists marched into Kensington intending to show the Irish and the Catholics just who was boss. Shots rang out, and an 18-year-old apprentice leatherworker named George Shifler (sometimes spelled “Shiffler”) fell mortally wounded, the first victim of the rioting. He instantly became a martyr for the nativists, the moment of his death dramatically and patriotically portrayed in a famous lithograph (above). The second riot, which lasted two days, broke out on July 6 in the Southwark section of the city, an area bordering the Northern Liberties on the southeast. Ten more people died, and the church of St. Phillip Neri narrowly escaped the fate of St. Michael and St. Augustine churches in Kensington. State militia were called in to quell both riots.

Did Samuel Hergesheimer take part in the riots? There's no way of knowing, of course. Whether he did or didn't participate, he would undoubtedly have been in sympathy with the rioting Protestant tradesmen.  It’s very possible Samuel knew, or had at least heard of George Shiffler, whose family lived in the Northern Liberties.  When Samuel’s and Mary Ann’s second son was born on June 15, 1845, a little more than a year after the outbreak of the Bible Riots, they might have decided to enshrine George Shifler's "martrydom" in their newborn's middle name.

By the way, nativism evolved into the “American Republican Party”, an anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, xenophobic political party whose early members were infamously known as “Know Nothings.” Did Samuel himself become a “Know Nothing”?

I’m not even going to go there.

* "Bibles, Public Schools, and Philadelphia's Bloody Riots of 1844" by Bruce Dorsey appeared in the 2008 (v. 8, no. 1) issue of Legacies, a publication of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania).