Maria Lightner, "Carmel"

History

This profile represents the woman George Lightner married who bore his children. In a baptism record for one of his children, she is described as "Maria". In A History of York County she is described as "a Miss Campbell", and was supposedly buried in the "old George Street cemetery" in York - a cemetery that no longer exists, because its residents were moved to the Prospect Hill cemetery at some point. A scroll by one of George Lightner's Lightner cousins, Leah, gives her the surname "Carmel".

The confusion is such that all that we can be utterly sure of only two things: she was called "Maria", and her surname sounded like "Karmel" or "Campbell".

The path of life that George Lightner took involved a migration. He was born in New Holland, in Lancaster County, and as a young man he left there and headed west to Manchester, York County. The route he took is not described, nor is the time he took in getting there. All we know for certain is that George's children were all born in York County, which means that it is plausible that he married after he left New Holland.

If we should take the "Miss Campbell" reference at face value, this presents a problem if he married in New Holland, because not only is there no New Holland marriage record, but at the time there seems to have been few or no Campbells around. This we learn thanks to modern online records and search engines - something that would not have been possible to determine before about 1995.

Where, then, might Campbells be found? It turns out that there was a significant family of Campbells located near what is now Hershey, PA, in what is now Derry Township, Dauphin County. And, interestingly enough, these Campbells were right across the river from George's Manchester farm, although inland a few miles.

So we can hypothesize that George headed west, and stayed for a while in Derry Township. There he married the daughter of a local Scottish family, and the couple crossed the river to set up their homestead in Manchester.

One might question whether a scion of the Germanic Lightners would easily marry into the likely-Presbyterian Campbells. That's less problematic than it first appears, because George's great-grandmother was herself 100% Scottish, a Douglas, and the Rutters that were her descendants intermarried with quite a number of Scots.

Maria, it is stated, "died young". I have taken that to mean she died shortly after her last child was born.

DNA

One of the driving reasons to question George Lightner marrying a Campbell was the fact that it did not explain one of his descendants DNA match with a family from Bas-Rhin named Duchmann. The Duchmanns stayed for a while in Lancaster County, before many of their number moved west to what is now West Virginia. Others stayed in Lancaster County for several generations. They would therefore have seemed like a good way of solving the DNA puzzle, and "Maria" is not a very typical Scottish given name.

However, it has now been shown that the DNA relationship in question between the Duchmanns and the specific George Lightner descendant can be met a different way, at least for that descendant. The details are unimportant but involve a previously unknown connection between the Duchmann family and a family in Wurttemberg. Thus, there is no need to find another connection.