Chapter 1: Cousins, Cantankery, and Ancestry Charts
May 10, 2023
It started in a conversation with my first cousins. There are about sixty of us; my dad is one of eleven children born to Hilda and Sam Stoltzfoos, whose descendants are referred to as “Hildasammys.”
Hildasammys are Stoltzfooses, and by that I mean, we spell our last name STOLTZ-F-O-O-S. Most people in Lancaster County with this last name spell it STOLTZ-F-U-S. And I always wondered why.
So a group of us Hildasammys got to talking about the Stoltzfus/Stoltzfoos split, and we'd all heard the same lore: two brothers (or maybe a father and son?) had a disagreement, and as a result, one of them changed their last name from Stoltzfus to Stoltzfoos, to set himself apart.
We were all in instant agreement that (1) that’s how we heard it, and (2) it does sound rather Foosy. Us Stoltzfooses have a tendency to be a bit, erm, hard-headed. “Stoltzfoos,” after all, translates to “Proud foot,” or as some of us prefer it, “Sure-footed.” But we can be a bit too proud, a bit too sure-footed, on occasion. Cantankerous, you might say. Dour. Opinionated. Stubborn. I’m just insulting myself with synonyms now. Here’s how some of my cousins put it:
“The do-it-you-own-way genes run strong,” one cousin said.
“We all know Fooses are willing to die on very small hills,” said another.
Like my kind, I am not the type to let things go. How the rest of the family is walking around with two “o”s in their last name, not asking any questions, is beyond me. I’ve decided I’ll get to the bottom of this. Here’s the first bit of digging I did, and the short video report I sent to my cousins: