Johan Martin Dostmann was born in 1730 in Nassig, Germany, and today his descendants can be found throughout the United States of America. One of them is Roy C. Ritter III, and he traces his family’s origins in this detailed history. Dostmann immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1752 with his sister and several friends and cousins, and so began the story of an enduring German-American family. After some time in Frederick County, Maryland, and Washington County, Pennsylvania, the family, which became known as Dustman, took advantage of the settlement opportunities in the newly formed Connecticut Western Reserve of Ohio, joining the state’s earliest pioneers. Johan Martin Dostmann died before that journey, but his surviving children and grandchildren made their mark in Ohio, particularly in Trumbull and Mahoning counties, where they prospered. Covering the first four generations of the Dustman family, this book will be a valuable resource for the descendants of Johan Martin Dostmann.

I first became interested in genealogy when I was about twelve. It was then that my paternal grandmother first introduced me to a book entitled Genealogy of the Fell Family in America Descended from Joseph Fell. This book, which was published in 1891, included my grandfather, Charles McConnell Lightburn. I was struck by the time span covered by the book—nearly three hundred years—and was fascinated by the fact that all of the people in that book were related to one another and to me either by blood or marriage! My grandmother later gave me that book, and it became the first book in my genealogical library. My grandfather and my great-aunt Mary told me that their father had fought for the North during the Civil War by the side of his older brother, who was a brigadier general. This fascinated me. They also told me that there was a town in West Virginia called Lightburn. I couldn’t wait to find it on a map! My own genealogical research did not begin until the late 1970s when I requested the Civil War records of my great grandfather, Calvin Luther Lightburn, and his brothers from the National Archives. During the 1980s, I continued my research, albeit at a very low level of activity. It was not until the early 1990s when I moved to the Washington, DC, area that I became intensively involved in—some might even say addicted to—genealogy. The resources in the Washington, DC, area are extensive, and I ended up spending many happy (and sometimes frustrating) hours conducting research in the National Archives, Library of Congress, and the library of the Daughters of the American Revolution. By 1999, I had amassed a great deal of genealogical information, most of which was stuffed in cardboard boxes. I was encouraged to put what I had on paper by Faye M. (Brown) Lightburn, who had published her book, Revolutionary Soldier Samuel Brown and Some of his Family in 1993. So after attending several related sessions at the National Genealogical Society Conference in the States, which was held that year in Providence, Rhode Island, I finally screwed up my courage and plunged in. I published the original book in 2003. This book is the second and probably last edition.

Contains checklist of recent additions to the genealogical collections of the Michigan Unit.

"To facilitate the use of the records and to describe their nature and content, our archivists prepare various kinds of finding aids. the present work is one such publication." --