The Kline Constellation

Michael Kline's town home and shoemaker's shop. He and Barbara his wife already held it in 1757, when they mortgaged it for £50. That mortgage is the record that first proves the family in Reading.

Michael moved to the country around 1790 and died here 5 April 1796. His will divided the land among his eight sons. This is the Kline country seat, and it anchors the family in the Kutztown corner for a century.

60 acres three miles west of Kutztown on the Easton Road. The family called this farm the "old Kline homestead." Philip settled it, Benjamin farmed it (real estate $5,000 in 1860), and Nathan was born on it. Boundary calls in neighbors’ deeds trace it down the generations: "land of Benjamin & Reuben Klein" becomes "Nathan & Reuben Klein."

The heart of the family. A single field of Penn Township farmland on a dirt lane that once had no name. The lane is Northkill Lane now, though some deeds still read Irish Creek Road. Webster and Erma bought the field, and it passed to their son Lloyd in 1945. In 1972 Lloyd carved it among his children into the cluster of family homes still standing there today.

The parcel Lloyd deeded to his son David in 1972. David lived here until his death in 2000; his ashes were spread on the family ground.

The Reading steelworks where Webster Allen Kline worked as a machinist until his death in 1937. A lifetime later, and on the other side of the family, Will’s maternal uncle Ronald "Whis" Morrison gave the same works thirty-five years. Two branches, one plant.

The county-run nursing home where David Thomas Kline worked.

Resting place of Philip Kline (1755-1828). A descendant photographed his stone.

Where Webster Allen Kline and Erma Viola Lloyd are buried.

Where Mary Drotter Kline rests, dead at 34 in June 1950.

Where Michael Drotter was laid to rest in 1922. He was a Greek-Catholic Rusyn immigrant buried in the town’s Latin-rite Catholic churchyard, as was the custom where no Byzantine church stood.

Where Maria Barbara Ruhl was buried in 1768. The record notes 'married 19 years, 11 children.'

One Carpathian village gave the family both of its Slovak lines: the Drotárs and the Čepans. A Carpatho-Rusyn, Greek (Byzantine) Catholic village whose parish of Sts. Peter & Paul kept the registers that carry the family back to the 1780s. Between 1890 and 1920 Jakubany lost roughly a third of its people to the American coal and mill towns. That wave took Michael in 1891 and Mary in 1902.

The anthracite coal town where Michael Drotter mined and raised his family, and where Mary Drotter (Will’s grandmother) was born in 1916.

The anthracite patch on Water Street where the Welsh Lloyds settled. Benjamin Lloyd worked the mines and his daughter Erma was born here in 1892, right beside the New Philadelphia where the Slovak Drotters lived. Two immigrant streams, one coal region.

The pine-and-sandhill corner of southeastern North Carolina where Sidney Robert Richardson was born in 1892 and raised his family in Bladenboro. This is the Carolina African-American world Will’s maternal line came from.

Where Ada Arline was born in 1892 to the carpenter Miles Arline. She would live to 108.

The Piedmont city where William Roan was born in 1909 and where his mother Mamie’s people lived, before he was orphaned and went north to Reading.

The Piedmont-NC ground of the Roan line, back to Spencer Roan (b. 1842, enslaved) and his parents Henderson & Eliza. That is about as far as an enslaved line can be traced.

The Great-Migration destination where the Carolina families put down roots. Ada Arline (as "Grandma Ada Berry") lived on Hudson Street, and Will’s mother Evelyn was born here.

A historic Black church cemetery in Mocksville: the Roan family burial ground. Here lie Spencer Roan (born enslaved, 1842-1909), his son Albert and daughter-in-law Mamie, and three Roan infants; the surrounding stones (Clement, Smoot, Furches, Carter) are the Black families of Reconstruction-era Davie County. The marked grave of Will’s enslaved-born 2nd-great-grandfather still stands.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers navigation lock and dam on the Cape Fear River, completed in 1917. It was the active federal jobsite at Elizabethtown that June. Sidney Richardson’s WWI draft card names it as the "government contract at Elizabethtown," where he worked as a laborer. A public work he helped build that still stands.

The national cemetery beside Fort Indiantown Gap. Will’s great-uncle Edgeco Richardson, a Technician Fourth Grade in the U.S. Army in World War II, is buried here with full military honors, in Section 39, Site 276. Here too rests John Delvin Benjamin, David’s stepbrother and a decorated Vietnam combat veteran. He was a Staff Sergeant in the U.S. Army, and he lies in plot 54-828.

A Berks County memorial park east of Reading where William Aaron Leroy Roan rests. He was Will’s maternal grandfather, and he came north from the Piedmont.