An interesting article concerning the maker of a candlestand. Can anyone help? Date: Thu, 06 Aug 1998 08:56:32 -0400 From: Melinda Talbot <[email protected]> Reply-To: [email protected] Organization: University of Delaware X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01C-UDEL (Win95; I) To: Janet Reinhold <[email protected]> Subject: Re: B. Kunkle artifact Thanks for keeping in touch. I hadn't written because I was hoping that I would hear from others I had contacted, but no luck so far. I did not find as much as I had hoped, but here is what I submitted to the curator: The maker of an iron candlestand (64.1534) marked his work "B. KUNKLE." The name probably meant something to neighbors and patrons when the object was made between 1750 and 1825. Today, the identity of the maker is a mystery. Many men named B. Kunkle, or variations of that name, appear in records from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however I came across no evidence that any were working as blacksmiths during that period. I found no references to any Kunkles in the books about iron I perused in the Winterthur library, so I turned to genealogy. I began my search by exploring the resources available on the World Wide Web. These databases yielded little information on my subject, but I am glad to have become familiar with them and what they offer. Some of them, including GenServ (www.genserv.com), a genealogical server system, and www.ancestry.com require membership fees, but probably have larger and more useful databases than other searchable databases that are free. GenServ allowed me a one-time free search that was forwarded to my Email address. Sites that were most useful for genealogical searches included WWW Genealogical Index (www.gendex.com/gendex/), which indexes hundreds of WWW databases containing genealogical data for over two million individuals; Roots Surname List (www.rootsweb.com/rootsweb/ searches), which contains 189,507 surnames; and USGenWeb Project (www.usgenweb.com/) which is organized by county. There is a website (www.flash.net/~conkle/INDEX.htm) maintained by Janet Reinhold that is dedicated to helping genealogists who are researching their Kunkle (and variations of the name) ancestors. I contacted Reinhold, and she has volunteered to post my query on a listserv that sends messages to Kunkle descendants. In addition, she is interested in featuring the object in "The Spindle," a family genealogical publication. World Wide Web searches led me to thirteen people who had posted their Email addresses on the Internet and invited queries. I received eight responses. None knew of a B. Kunkle who worked with iron. One woman, Elizabeth Brake, wrote that she is related to Kunkles who were glassmakers who came from Florsbach, Germany in the mid-eighteenth century and settled in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. John Decker suggested that I contact the "family historian" James E. Kunkle of Edgewater, Colorado. I wrote to him on April 27, 1998. If I receive any information from him, I will add it to the object file. By far the most helpful source I used was the Family History Center in Wilmington, Delaware. Two databases available only through the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints are the Ancestral File and International Genealogical Index. These contain a vast amount of information culled from a wide variety of sources. No doubt a visit the main Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah would yield an even greater amount of useful information. Rosetta Maxine Bennett, Irene Kunkle Hannum, James Erwin Kunkle, Manly Mallett, and Sara Kunkle Shoop have all written histories of the Kunkle family. These are available through the library in Salt Lake City. All of the B. Kunkles I found who lived during the period were from Pennsylvania. There is even a Kunkletown, Pennsylvania north of Allentown. None of the people I found were from that location. It would not be surprising, however, if the candlestand were from Pennsylvania because H. F. duPont acquired many objects in that region. What follows is a list of possible identities of the candlestand's maker. [to be continued]