The Manges, Medling, Roarabaugh, Chilcoat, Horn and others Family History

One of the goals of an amateur genealogist like myself is to publish a book showing the backward path of one's family heritage. Each of us recall our own past travels and experiences that have brought us to where we presently reside in life-and while these experiences were important to each of us-all of our ancestors experienced similar events in their own times, in their own ways, and in their own environments. Today's generations feel the same pride of living in a modern world that our relatives living in 1700 felt as they looked back at their ancestors who lived in the 1600s before them. And yet it is seldom that a modern man or woman takes the time to consider the thoughts or lifestyles of their future descendants, but life goes on and our descendants will wonder how their ancestors of the 20th and 21st centuries managed to cope with so little to support them. Another goal of a genealogist is accuracy: but to what degree of accuracy? Exact dates for births and deaths are especially sought after, but almost impossible to be sure of: tombstones are sometimes added to grave sites many years after a relative's death, dates of birth and christening are sometimes as confused with each other as the day of death and the day of burial, old tombstone "8's" become "0's" with stone deterioration, mistakes are common on newspaper death notices, and so on. While accuracy is always preferred, it is the actual life-details of that are more important. A few days, months, or even a few year's error has little real meaning in the life of an ancestor. It is our life's events that have the most meaning and it is sad that so little is known about our ancestor's prior existence-leading to the question: "What will your future descendants know about you?"During the last thirty-five years I've been researching my wife's and my own family genealogies. The following information was collected in courthouses, historical societies, family newsletters, correspondence with other researchers, from family members, the internet (copying and researching), and various other sources.I began gathering this family information with little knowledge of what I was doing or where the research would lead, but I learned about genealogy along the way and my methods of research slowly evolved into competent procedures. I couldn't name all of my sources if I wanted to, but there were a few sources that warrant special notation since more than average assistance or information came from them: The Manges Newsletter, edited by Helen Menges Mains; Bender-Bainter-Painter . . . family information compiled by Joseph Linn Marino; The Hull Family History, compiled by Ruth Hull Robertson; The Horn Family, compiled by James E. Potts; information on the Manges family from Betty Jane Philpot; and information on the Bender family from Doris Gragg. A large portion of my research papers have been donated to the Pioneer Historical Society in Bedford, Pennsylvania [Note: the previous information was written in 1995 for a previous edition of this book. Since that time the book has more than doubled in size]. And now I continue these notes in 2011.I did not join any two families that I knew did not belong attached to each other. There are some attachments that are weakly bound, but if there was no reason to join two families I did not do so, nor did I join any two families with the goal of simply extending the lineage further back in time, or to add a greater number of names to my family tree chart. My primary concern has always been to honor mine and my wife's ancestors by reporting them as accurately as possible, as I hope my future descendants will express that honesty in researching my generation.Ron Walker 2011