The Kline Constellation

Michael Kline was one of tens of thousands of German-speaking "Palatines" who fled war, crop failure, and crowded land in the Rhineland for Pennsylvania. They floated down the Rhine to Rotterdam, sailed to Philadelphia, and swore an oath of allegiance on arrival — the passenger lists that survive today. Many arrived as redemptioners, working off their passage; Michael, a literate shoemaker, was in Berks County by the 1750s. The leading candidate for his crossing is the St. Andrew, which qualified at Philadelphia on 2 October 1741.

The Klines, Leshers, Wanners, Hubers, and Zweizigs were deep Pennsylvania-German ("Pennsylvania Dutch") stock — farmers who worked the limestone soils of Berks County for two centuries, spoke a German dialect at home, and worshipped in the old Lutheran and Reformed "Union" churches like St. John’s Gernants and St. John’s Kutztown. Their farms passed son to son by will and deed; the "old Kline homestead" west of Kutztown stayed in the family from Philip through Nathan.

Lloyd Wilson Kline served in the U.S. Army in World War II, one of the millions of American men who left small towns for the largest war in history and came home to build families and houses. He returned to Penn Township, took up the family land, and in time carved it among his children.

Jakubany was a Carpatho-Rusyn village — an East-Slavic, Greek (Byzantine) Catholic people of the northern Carpathians, distinct from their Slovak neighbors. The family worshipped at the Greek Catholic church of Sts. Peter & Paul, whose Latin-kept registers carry the Drotárs and Čepans back to the 1780s. Between 1890 and 1920 the village lost roughly a third of its people to the American coal and mill towns — the wave that carried Michael Drotter (1891) and Mary Chepan (1902) to Pennsylvania.

Two of the family’s immigrant streams met in the hard-coal country of Schuylkill County: the Welsh Lloyds at Cumbola and the Rusyn Drotters at New Philadelphia, patches a few miles apart. It was dangerous, sooty work — miners, pump men, and breaker boys feeding the anthracite that heated the industrial Northeast. Mary Drotter, Will’s grandmother, was born into that world in New Philadelphia in 1916.

Skilled Welsh colliers left the valleys of South Wales for the Pennsylvania anthracite fields through the mid-1800s, often taking the foreman and engineer roles their experience earned. Jane Lloyd, born in Wales about 1834, brought the family to Cumbola; by 1880 she was a widow heading the household, her sons Benjamin and James in the mines. The Welsh given name "Morgan Lloyd" runs through the family.

In the great movement of African Americans out of the rural South, two Carolina families — the Richardsons of the Cape Fear and the Roans of the Piedmont — came north to Reading, Pennsylvania, and met there. Ada Arline lived on Hudson Street; Silverlean Richardson raised her family in the city; William Roan arrived around 1934. Will’s mother Evelyn was born of that meeting.

Sidney Robert Richardson’s world was the pine-and-sandhill corner of southeastern North Carolina — born in Cumberland County, married in Columbus County, living in Bladenboro. The family tradition of Haliwa-Saponi descent was examined carefully and, honestly, set aside: the geography and records point to an ordinary African-American family of the Cape Fear, and only a DNA test could reopen the question. The truth here is told plainly, as the family deserves.

The Roan line reaches back into the enslaved era of the Carolina Piedmont — to Henderson and Eliza Roan, born in bondage in Davie County in the 1810s–20s, and their son Spencer, born enslaved about 1842. In 1870, in the first year it was possible, Spencer and Lucinda Humphry registered their marriage as free people — a small, documented act of freedom that opens this branch of the family to the record.