History buffs are observing the 250th anniversary of the French and Indian War these days—an event which impacted our Truby and Bauman ancestors significantly. The common ancestor of the Marshall, Robinson, Bailey, and Turk families of Parker, Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, was Catharina Truby Rohrer Marshall.  Her father was Colonel Christopher Truby and her mother was Sybilla Bauman, daughter of Hans Dietrich Bauman and Eva Elizabeth Weil.  In 18th-century eastern Pennsylvania, the Baumans lived in the Towamensing region of what is now Carbon County, near the Blue Mountains.  The Trubys lived at Newtown, Bucks County.

       The incredible defeat of British General Edward Braddock in July 1755 near present-day Pittsburgh made vulnerable all the European settlements—even far across the mountains to the East.  By the summer of 1756, our ancestors were in grave danger of captivity or death at the hands of warring Native Americans and their French allies.  Bauman sent his family southeast to the town of Easton for safety. Along the Lehigh River, Benjamin Franklin oversaw the construction of Fort Allen for the Pennsylvania provincial government.  Located in the present town of Weissport, the fort provided regional protection for our ancestors and their neighbors. 

       Christopher Truby was 20 years old in 1756. On behalf of his widowed mother and his siblings, he found himself that year dealing with a less than honorable executor in settling his father’s estate.  Truby soon enlisted in the Pennsylvania militia and was stationed at Fort Allen, north of Bethlehem and Easton.  Sybilla Bauman had been sent to the Female Seminary established in 1749 by the Moravians at Bethlehem—one of the first schools for girls in the colonies and a relatively safe place for Bauman’s daughters.  In 1760, the student and the soldier eloped. Their first child, Stophel (Christopher), was born the next year—the same year Sybilla’s father died.  One family tradition says that our distant grandfather Dietrich Bauman was killed by Indians.  

       When Sybilla and Christopher  moved west in 1771—making their home in an equally dangerous Westmoreland County—Truby built a small fort on their land and named it Fort Allen—known locally as Truby’s Blockhouse.  In 1782, Hanna’s Town, the county seat, was burned by Indians and Canadian rangers.  Truby and his neighbors, three miles away, lobbied to bring the seat of government to their village, christened by Truby as Newtown. The place would soon become Greensburg.  There his daughter Catharina would give birth to two Rohrer and four Marshall children—our long-ago ancestors whose names and stories we’ve not forgotten.