In view of the literature the genome of Jacob Reiff (1698-1782) from his father and mother, and in his brothers and sister that has been so determinate in subsequent generations must be remembered as part of a community of like souls before and after they lived in Montgomery County PA. Jacob was tempered by being the youngest among 4 brothers, with only one sister younger than he, growing up in the pristine forests of Montgomery Country and roaming with abandon those hills and valleys, further tempered by the kindred spirits of neighbors of high principle and force, among whom he worked and studied. By 1717, the first record of the boundaries of his father's land, he was at 19 a fully seasoned and well educated, completely outside the universities. James Heckler, History of Lower Salford Township (26-35) said “he was the most prominent man in the early history of Salford" (26) so much so that conflict sought him out, but he persevered.
Knowing English, German, Dutch fluently, he was delegated among this people in an ex officio capacity, which would later become official. He is called one of the 4 most educated which no doubt traces to his mother and father, his mother being the daughter of a Dutch Reformed official given all advantage in her education, and his father, a blacksmith, was a man of poised and equable spirit, early and late a man of distinction, so no wonder this Jacob was given his father’s blacksmith tools, no wonder he was an executor among these high spirited people and, thanks be to our Creator, no wonder he was also a polemicist of high order and fought for what he deemed right, with all that will bring in any and every such man, whose spirit unquenched and his faith much tested, was a patriarch to many generations.
No one has written more cogently than Dr. Harry Reiff who uses all his skills and analysis as a PhD chemist to examine these matters. He says,
"the only document in English that I know of that may have been written by an Anna Reiff is the Hans George Reiff will, now in the files in Philadelphia City Hall. Since the will was probated in 1727, it is unlikely that it was written by Jacob's wife Anna, [he means because Jacob did not marry until 1733] but possibly by Jacob's mother Anna. No proof of who or when; and additionally, I've heard that the original will was in German, but no proof of that either. Some years ago I read one of Henry Dotterer's reports from his European travels in which he noted the possibility that Hans George Reiff married Anna Maria, the educated daughter of a Dutch Reformed churchman. If indeed she wrote Hans George's will, she was surely educated. Now, the historian Henry Dotterer wrote several books in his historical journeys. Two of the published books are in the stacks of the Pennsylvania Historical Society in Philadelphia, but there is a third unpublished one which I saw about 10 years ago. They wouldn't let me make a copy of it, but as I recall, Dotterer recounted his visit to the Netherlands and the Dutch Reformed Church archives, where he found data that Hans George married an educated daughter of a church minion (HER, Letters, 20 November 2002)."
These remarks do no jibe with those of Mary Jane Hershey in " Between the Lines: Stories of Women Leaders in the Franconia Conference" that
" Anna Marie Reiff had a daughter-in-law, also named Anna. The younger Anna is remembered through an unusual document which she wrote in 1773. The manuscript was written with "a neat hand in English," quite exceptional because Ann lived in a German-speaking community from which most surviving hand-written papers are in German." (Mennonite Historical Bulletin, October, 1995).
I had inquired of the author what document that was but did not get a reply.
