Our Story

A homeland with a long memory

The Rhineland-Palatinate — the Pfalz — has a complicated history even by European standards. Julius Caesar's legions founded its cities two thousand years ago; the region became one of seven electorates entitled to choose the Holy Roman Emperor; the University of Heidelberg opened its doors in 1386. It is still known, today, as one of Germany's two great wine regions, and often called "the Tuscany of Germany" for its castles, its Roman ruins, and one of Europe's largest forests.

It also suffered terribly. The Thirty Years' War, fought between Catholics and Protestants from 1618 to 1648, killed a third of the region's people — Christians killing Christians in the name of God. Louis XIV's armies destroyed Heidelberg Castle in 1688, whose ruin still stands. Heavy wartime taxation and a "little ice age" of brutal weather followed, and between 1730 and 1740 thousands of displaced Palatines emigrated — many of them becoming the "Pennsylvania Dutch" of American memory. Johann Philipp Krazer, born near Heidelberg in 1695, was one of them.

A crossing, and a name that changed

Philipp left everything familiar at twenty-seven, in the wake of that war and that weather. He traveled weeks down the Rhine to Dover, then six to ten more weeks across the Atlantic aboard the Snow Molly under Captain John Howell — a ship about a hundred feet long, crewed by fifteen to twenty sailors, carrying roughly a hundred adult passengers (ninety-five of them fellow Palatines) and another fifty or so dependents who, by the custom of the time, never made it onto the manifest at all. He landed in Philadelphia on 10 September 1737 with his teenage son Heinrich at his side, and signed the oath of allegiance to George II that every arriving male had to sign. Neither of them could have known that Philipp's own grandson and namesake would one day rescind that same oath to fight in the American Revolution.

The name on that oath isn't quite the name this family carries now; "Krazer" and "Kratzer" drift into "Krotzer" over the generations that follow, the way immigrant names usually do — clerks, accents, and habit doing the work a formal decision never did.

Philipp's own death, sometime around 1788, has never been pinned to a grave. It's a reasonable date, not a proven one — the first of several places in this history where the record runs out before the story does.

Which grave is ours?

Heinrich's son, Johan Philip Krotzer, was orphaned at fifteen and emancipated at eighteen. The following spring, his own court-appointed guardian enlisted him into the 4th Company, 4th Battalion of the Northampton County militia — alongside that guardian, and alongside Philip's own older brother Anthony, an officer in the same unit. It was after Yorktown, so the family's own account suspects the three of them likely never saw combat: "they didn't know what to expect at the time that they came forward to fight for our independence." He married Catherine Jacoby, moved the family to Clarion County after the war, and by all accounts lived a full life as a recognized soldier of the Revolution — his grave today kept by the DAR, whose membership his female descendants, through an unbroken female line, are eligible to join.

Except there were three men named Philip Kratzer in that part of Pennsylvania, born around the same years, and the county records don't cleanly separate them. Two different burial sites — one in Clarion County, one in Snyder County, under the town name "Kratzerville" — both had reasonable claims to being our Philip. In 2018, Scott's father Steve hired the Northampton County Historical & Genealogical Society to settle it. A volunteer named Howard McGinn traded emails back and forth for weeks, working through militia rolls, court guardianship records, and the Jacoby marriage, before concluding that Clarion County is the correct grave — the one marked, correctly this time, "Soldier of the Revolution."

A second marker stands at that same grave: a stone cube reading simply "OUR GRAND PARENTS KROTZER," with a DAR medallion set into one face. Read cold, it sounds like a general family-plot stone, and for a while this site described it that way. But the family's own research folder captions this exact photograph as the "Grave stone of Johan Phillip Krotzer, 'soldier of the revolution'" — not a plot marker at all, but Philip's own second memorial, placed and still tended by the DAR. Two of his female descendants qualify for DAR membership through him today: Steven's daughter Antonia, and Solomon's daughter Lucy.

It's a small, quiet piece of historical detective work, and this site treats it as exactly the kind of story worth showing in full: the two competing Find a Grave printouts, and the reasoning that told them apart.

A family divided

Philip's son John became a stonemason in Clarion County; some of the gravestones he carved reportedly still stand at Churchville Cemetery today, all of them facing East except one — his own third son Jacob's, which faces West, "the custom regarding the spiritual leader of the community." John and his wife Anna Mary Rime had seven children, and the Civil War split them the way it split the nation: Daniel, the second son, joined the Confederacy along with one of his own sons, while two of his brothers — Reuben and Henry — wore Union blue.

It's Henry — Henry J. Krotzer, born 26 September 1833 — who carries the direct line. He served nearly the entire war with Company F of the 67th Pennsylvania Infantry: Fredericksburg, the Wilderness, and the Battle of Monocacy in July 1864, where a badly outnumbered Union force bought Washington, D.C. just enough time to save itself, under a commanding officer, General Lew Wallace, who would later write Ben-Hur. After the war Henry moved his family south to Tennessee, where he was reportedly called a "carpetbagger" by his new neighbors, worked as a carpenter as well as a farmer, and married three times across his life, fathering fourteen children in all. He also started a family tradition that's still going: a saw, carved with his own initials, that every generation since has added their mark to — see The Saw.

A powder horn survives from Henry too, hand-lettered with his name and this exact birthdate. His youngest son by his first wife, Milton, fared less well by comparison: Milton's own wife died delivering their son Duran, and by the family's own account Milton "seems to have been missing in action" afterward, leaving the boy to be raised by his sister, a spinster aunt affectionately known as "Mamie."

Two brothers, two Detroit families

Mamie's "Tom Sawyer like" upbringing — "a garden, one cow, chickens, and a glorious grape arbor" — didn't keep Duran Albert Krotzer home for long. He joined the Navy around 1911 and served aboard the armored cruiser USS Montana, which saw the 1913 Balkan War and, in 1919, made six trips repatriating American troops home from France. He was also a Freemason. After his discharge he married Laura May Chitwood of Estill Springs, Tennessee, in Chattanooga in 1916 — though by then he'd already moved to Detroit, where he worked as a tool-and-die tradesman at the Dodge and later Chrysler plants, until, by his son Steven's account, he was fired at the height of the Depression for organizing with the union.

Laura's own family carried its own considerable lore: seven siblings, a tradition of teaching, and ties to Sharp College in Winchester — founded in 1851 as one of the first women's colleges to grant degrees equal to the men's colleges of its day. The Chitwoods freed their own slaves in the 1850s, sending them to Liberia; a Chitwood great-grandfather fought for the Union despite being from the South; and the extended Chitwood/Eden family claims kinship — unverified — with John Hancock, Francis Scott Key, and Anthony Eden of Great Britain. A cousin on that side, the poet Sharon Doubiago, became nationally recognized, and letters between her and Steven Scott Krotzer survive in the family's keeping.

Duran and Laura raised three sons in a coal-heated, two-bedroom house in a Polish and Italian Detroit neighborhood near Hamtramck. Albert Ray, the eldest, married Xenia Kitchen and had a daughter, Jill. George Milton followed his father into the Navy, married Lottie Marchewka, and had five children — James Robert, Diane, Frances Lee, Frank Duran, and Albert Fred. It's the youngest brother, Robert Keith, who carries the direct line forward.

Detroit, and two lines converging

Robert Keith Krotzer — Scott's grandfather — grew up alongside Albert and George in Detroit, at a Pershing High School social club called "the Hi-Lites," where a classmate named Edwin Zurawka eventually introduced him to his own younger sister. In 1946 Robert converted to Catholicism to marry Christine "Penny" Zurawka, the daughter of Polish immigrants John F. Zurawka and Lillian Rose Stafinski. A German Protestant line that had been in America since 1737 married into a Polish Catholic family that had arrived within living memory — two very different immigrant stories, meeting in the same city, in the same generation. Their wedding party included Robert's groomsmen John Petrevich, Ed Zurawka (Penny's own brother), and John Kaleta, alongside bridesmaids Audrey Dibier, Lois Mercer, and Dorothy Derstadt. Between the meeting and the wedding, though, came six years of Navy service and a world war — the next section.

Robert and Penny's first child, Suzanne, was born 2 August 1947; their son Steven — a physician at the Mayo Clinic, and the one who started writing all of this down — followed on 10 October 1951. One family photo from 1961 shows the two of them in home-made Halloween costumes, with a caption in Steven's own voice: "Mom made the costumes. Jewelry included dried chicken bones." The family later put down roots in Harrison Township, Michigan, near Lake St. Clair.

A submarine, and the day Japan surrendered

Robert graduated high school into the Depression-era job market and was promised a trade position at Ternstedt — until it went to the foreman's son instead. Rather distraught, by his son's account, he walked straight from that disappointment into a Navy recruiting office and signed on for six years. It was 1939, two years before the United States entered the war. He was on shore leave at a Norfolk movie house one evening, aboard the seaplane tender USS Albemarle at the time, when the film stopped, the lights came up, and every serviceman in the theater was ordered to report to his post: Pearl Harbor had just been attacked.

By 1942 Robert had volunteered for submarine duty as a Pharmacist's Mate aboard the USS Pilotfish — the only medical presence aboard a diesel submarine at war in the Pacific, trained at the Naval Hospital in Balboa Park, San Diego, and carrying written step-by-step instructions for performing an appendectomy at sea, on the reasoning that "it won't rain if you carry an umbrella." His shipmates called him "Doc" for the rest of his life. The Silent Service lost roughly one submarine crew in five during the war; the Pilotfish ran silent under Japanese depth charges more than once, and at times patrolled as part of a three-boat "wolfpack."

He was there for the end of it, and left his own account of that day, as his son Steven transcribed it:

"A submarine operates alone, mostly. We were escorted the last and first 4 or 5 hours into and out of port so that 'friendlies' would not attack us. After that we were alone…awfully alone…usually at far advanced spots to harass the enemy. So it was the day the war ended; alone off Honshu, the big Japanese island, on rescue duty for the bombers from Saipan and the fighter planes from Iwo Jima. We were assigned to Tokyo Bay with the fleet for the peace signing and I was on lookout when we saw them (the fleet) a couple of days later. Suddenly the horizon was filled with masts…like a picket fence. Hey, we weren't alone!…hooray for our side. The Pilotfish flew down between two lines of ships…flank speed…showing off, I guess…as horns blew all around. Soon other subs joined in and we all steamed into Tokyo Bay where McArthur signed the war's end aboard the USS Missouri. How can I forget that day?"

He carried a card in his wallet for the rest of his life certifying his presence aboard the Pilotfish for the formal Japanese surrender, signed by Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood, and Admiral William Halsey; a Detroit newspaper ran his name among the witnesses under the headline "Witnesses Japanese Formal Surrender." Decades later, treating a prominent Japanese patient at the Mayo Clinic, Steven found himself describing that same day back to her — the war meeting the peace it made possible, twice over, in one family.

Meanwhile Penny had trained as a nurse and finished the war a commissioned Navy ensign at Great Lakes Naval Base — technically outranking, on paper, the enlisted chief petty officer she'd go on to marry. Robert used the GI Bill for pharmacy school after the war, becoming the first college-educated professional in this family's three-hundred-year American line. The Pilotfish itself didn't outlive its own crew's peacetime by much: the Navy expended it as a target ship in the postwar Bikini atomic bomb tests, and it now rests, sunk, at about 80 feet — a depth Robert liked to joke his old boat "was quite comfortable at."

The research, twice over

In 2018, Steve paid a historical society by the hour and traded careful emails with a volunteer to settle a hundred-and-eighty-year-old question about a headstone. In August 2026, his son Scott picked the thread back up — texting a family member, running a research session with an AI assistant on the Palatinate background, and finally sitting down to build this site. A few weeks later, working from the fuller memoir manuscript and two hand-drawn family charts, that same research turned up fourteen children instead of five for one generation, three brothers' worth of Detroit descendants instead of one, and a great many names that had simply never made it off the page before. A second, clearer batch of the same family's own photographs — retaken specifically to settle what the first batch had left ambiguous — is what finally resolved the grave-marker question above, filled in Robert's wartime chapter, and carried the family's own current-descendants chart down to Scott's own children. The tools changed. The questions didn't.