To understand the nature of this work, we must first discuss the way it began, and how it developed. I grew up in Evanston, Illinois, a suburb north of Chicago. My father was the only CELL in the entire Cook County area - at least in the phone Historys. ALL the CELL families I ever knew about as a child were his cousins, and all had roots in Franklin County, PA. After two years of College, in Kalamazoo, Michigan and two more years at the University of Chicago, I still knew of no other unrelated Cell families. So when I married and moved to Southern California, and discovered a Paul and Ruth Cell living in Mar Vista, within five miles of our newly wed apartment on the Venice Beach, I wanted to know who they were. My Dad did not know, so he suggested I contact "Aunt Lottie", his father's oldest surviving sibling at that time. She then lived in a retirement home in LaJolla, California. Her younger brother, Christian Cell, with his wife Ruth, lived in near by Vista, California. We went to visit them. They did not know who Paul and Ruth Cell of Mar Vista were either, but Aunt Lottie was sure they must be part of the "Colorado Cousins"!! And so the quest began to learn of my Cell Family heritage. That was in 1960.
Within a very few years I had met and befriended Paul and Ruth Cell of Mar Vista; learned that they too descended from Franklin County, Pennsylvania Cell's. I collected a long list of Cell families. As I learned more and more about each family, and how they were connected, my desire to visit Franklin County, PA and find the roots of our family grew. Soon it became apparent that our common ancestor, and the earliest Cell in Franklin County was a Thomas, perhaps John Thomas Cell. (Your can read about him in Part 1, chapter 9.) By this time, I had begun to number the various Cell and Sell families.
I knew that my earliest proven ancestor, John Cell, 1793-1875, was not the emigrant, so I reserved "Part I" for the emigrant(s) and started with Part II for my Cell family, who I knew had left Franklin County about 20 years after the Civil War to homestead in Kansas. As I learned of a new branch of the family, I created a new "Part" or section to my growing History.
Finally in 1969 my parents gave me the gift of a trip to Pennsylvania. My three children and I flew to Chicago to join my parents, and then drove in my parents' car to Pennsylvania and later to New England. In Franklin County I learned for the first time, that before the Civil War no one in our family knew how to spell our surname! The records had it as Cell, Gell, Gesell, Gsell, Sell, Sells, and Zell and a few more variations of these spellings. The "Colorado Cousins" had told us that our common ancestor was Thomas Cell/Sell. We found he had died intestate about 1825, and only two marriage records, one for a daughter, and another for a son, named him specifically as the father. We could find no trace of his wife's name, and no proof as to how many children he had or who for sure they were. And NO clues what so ever to his parents or place of birth!! Some thirty years later, we still have no proof of any of these sought after pieces to our puzzle. But we have collected an increasing number of descendants!!
Soon it became evident that this Thomas Cell/Gesell/Sell/Zell was the proverbial "brick wall". My grandfather's notes said that the family had come from Zweibrucken, Germany. So I decided to look for ALL possible emigrants who might have come from Germany and spelled their name is some similar way.
My parents had visited Germany in 1965 and met a Joseph Zell, deputy mayor of Strassburg, and learned of their family newsletter "die Familienpost". They sent me copies of this newsletter, but it was written in German, so I had to find a neighbor in Venice, California who could translate it. He was LDS, and soon, so was I.
Now my interest in Family History expanded to include ALL my ancestors, and not just the Cell's. But most of the rest turned out to have fewer "brick wall's"! So eventually I always came back to wanting to know more about the Cell's.
When in Germany my parents had also learned that the earliest known source of our surname was derived from monks in a monastery in Holland, who have left the Catholic Church to join Martin Luther's reformation. In the monastery they had been called "Celle brothers", and so when they left the monastery life, they took the surname of Celle, which later became Zell and Zelle in Germany, and Sell in England.
My father died in December 1969, just a few months after that long desired trip to Pennsylvania. Partly in tribute to him, and partly to "compete" with our cousins in Germany, I began in January 1970 to circulate a Celle family newsletter. I chose the name in tribute to those early monks of Holland.
As most good things do, the project grew rapidly, and soon I had "cousins" from many different families contributing their efforts to our search. Any and all with Pennsylvania German ties were welcomed. Soon it expanded to include any and all with similar surnames of Pennsylvania ancestry. Then it grew to any with pre-Revolutionary War ancestry of our surname, anywhere in America, the US or Canada.
As each new family joined in, we just created a new section or "Part" to our Celle Family History. It grew like Topsy! So today, there is no rhyme or order to the numbering system at all! In fact related families are neither in order nor sequential. Therefore it is necessary at this time to make some adjustments in order to create some order from this chaos. Through out the newsletters these "Parts" in our Celle Family History are referenced. The newsletters are published "as first written" on the Family Celle CD Volume 1.
We are now about to publish, for the first time in its entirity, "The Celle Family History", on the Family Celle CD Volume 2. So to create order from chaos, AND to maintain the references used in the newsletters for some thirty years now, I have come up with the following compromise, made possible by modern technology.
First: there will be a listing to follow in numerical order, of the Parts of the Celle Family History as they evolved over the years. You can link from this listing to the Part you wish to read. This will enable those reading the newsletters, past or present, to locate references without an exhausting search.
Second: The contents of the Celle Family History has now been reorganized to appear as if we had known who belonged to whom from the beginning. All emigrant ancestors are still labeled Part I, but now they have an outline of descendants, with their Parts and chapters listed as they were first given. Visit the Table of Contents to see how it looks now.
