Our Legacy as a Creative, Musical Family

Welcome to my family history writings. After many years of attempting to get this material in shape to share with others, I’m trying this website as a way to share it without the hurdles of “publishing a book”. This way, I can continue the research, keep things corrected and updated, and hopefully fit it in better with a busy life.

My research has uncovered stories that have excited and compelled me to find out more. As a teaser, some of the narratives of this “epic” include:

• The founding German-speaking Selzer family that established itself in Shenandoah Valley, before the revolutionary war
• The farmer-turned-soldier who served in Washington’s favorite Virginia Militia, was shot in the leg by the British, and went on be a Kentucky pioneer
• The rural physician’s assistant who became a battlefield surgeon during the Civil War, and then lectured about Christian Science for Mary Baker Eddy
• A family of Wisconsin lead-mining pioneers that struck it big, but whose town lost out to Chicago as the center of commerce in the Midwest
• The Quaker pioneer family who fled slave-owning Virginia to make their way across the Midwest
• An intrepid newspaper man from London who became a baptist minister, married into an ancient merchant family dating back to the Mayflower
• The legendary story of Annejte Jans, Dutch matriarch of lower Manhattan: are the Sulcers descended from her, or not? You will have to stayed tuned to get the answer
• An entrepreneurial family of Chicago brothers who were national players in the music and jewelry businesses around the turn of the Twentieth century
• General MacArthur’s psychological warfare mastermind who received the highest civilian honors – from the Emperor of Japan!

I have a lot of material to share, and it will all be coming to this website – I promise! To get the ball rolling, I’m going to start with narratives about what I consider the nexus of all of it: my grandparents, Henry D. and Charlotte T. Sulcer. All of the stories I mentioned above are about their ancestors. They themselves led fascinating lives, and were a huge influence over the generations that followed them.

Is this of interest to you? Well, if you are descended from Henry and Charlotte, through Henry T. or Sandy Sulcer, including Gordy Sulcer, Debby Sulcer, Charity Poth, Tom Sulcer, Ginna Marston, or me (David Sulcer), I’m sure you will see many common threads with the modern day Sulcer families. I also think they, and their times, are just interesting in their own right. Also, over time, as I publish more pages about the other families in our tree, these articles could be relevant for many of our more distant relatives.

Continue on to read about Henry and Charlotte here, the remarkable Civil War surgeon and Christian Scientist, Henry’s father A.A. Sulcer, or Charlotte’s show-business uncle Harry B. Thearle.

The newest article is about the Sulcer’s purported connection to the fascinating (and rather famous) Dutch colonist of New Amsterdam, Annetje Jans.

Enjoy!