A huge tribe of Robinson and Marshall cousins descend from her--our common ancestor, Anna Catharina Truby.  After the custom of the Pennsylvania Germans, she was called “Catharina”—“Anna" was her baptismal name.  Born in eastern Pennsylvania in about 1763, Catharina was the daughter of Colonel Christopher Truby (born 1736 in eastern Pennsylvania), a descendant of French Huguenots, a soldier and an early settler in Westmoreland County.  The Trubys moved across the Appalachian Mountains to the near vicinity of present-day Greensburg in 1771.  There Truby took his place in the civil and military life of the Pennsylvania frontier. Catharina’s mother was Sybilla Bauman (born 1743, also in Pennsylvania), and the family found itself part of the growing German-speaking community of this region.  Sybilla died in 1801, and Christopher the next year on 20 February in Catharina’s tavern-home in Greensburg.  His son-in-law, John Marshall, was an administrator of Truby’s estate.

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John Marshall and his wife, the widowed Catharina Truby Rohrer, kept a tavern in Greensburg in the first years of the 19th century.  It was located on East Pittsburgh Street--the main east-west road between Greensburg and Pittsburgh--but we've not yet learned its name.  This property remained in the possession of Catharina's son Frederick Augustus Rohrer throughout much of his long life in Greensburg.  When the family moved to New Lancaster, Ohio, in late 1805, they apparently intended to continue this occupation there--a conclusion based on the extensive inventory of their possessions after their deaths in the summer of 1806.  Several family members are working on deciphering this remarkable inventory, to share with all their descendants.

John and Catharina Marshall:

Their Books

Excerpted from an Inventory of their Possessions

at the Time of their Deaths

New Lancaster, Ohio:  Summer 1806