The brothers at Springdale Farm.

Long before Donald Melick grew up on a dairy farm near Oldwick, his mother's family had made a working life in the same New Jersey countryside. Behind the Beavers name were brothers who farmed together, sisters whose lives followed different paths, and generations of neighboring families.

A farm, and two brothers

Joseph H. Beavers was born near Lebanon in September 1870 to Harmon Beavers and Julia Ann Pickel. In 1900 he was recorded as a farm laborer in Clinton Township, living with his new wife Cora in a rented house. By 1910 the census called him a dairy farmer; in 1920, a farm manager. Those descriptions change, but agriculture remains the thread through his life.

Only after Joseph's death did a newspaper preserve another important fact: he and his brother Howard operated Springdale Farm together for approximately thirty years. The obituary does not say who owned the property. What survives is the picture of two brothers staying at daily work together for decades.

Their parents, Harmon and Julia, had married in October 1866. A family history names siblings Alice, Margaret, Frederick, Lucretia, Edward and Howard. Edward, missing from one version of the digital family tree, appears both in that genealogy and independently in Joseph's obituary. Their mother Julia was still alive when Joseph died, in her nineties.

Cora, Bertha, and the daughter missing from a chart

Cora Shaffer came from another Hunterdon farming family. Her parents, George W. Shaffer and Sarah Frances Cook, married in 1868. The 1900 census found George farming on mortgaged land and Sarah reporting two children, both living. Yet the later family-tree export listed only Cora.

A family genealogy published in 1903 supplies the other name: Bertha Shaffer, Cora's older sister. Bertha married into the Schuyler family and had a son, Floyd. She was not lost to history; she had simply been left out of one family chart. The sisters' two households now belong together in this account.

Julia's people: Pickel, Hildebrant, Howell and Sutton

Joseph's mother Julia brought other generations into the story. Her father Frederick Pickel was the son of George Pickel and Sarah Howell. Her mother Mary Hildebrant was the daughter of Matthias Hildebrant and Charity Sutton. These were families connected through the villages, marriages, and churches around New Germantown.

The historian Theodore F. Chambers preserved Matthias and Charity's children in an 1895 genealogy: Hannah, Mary, Julia, Charity, Peter and George. Their marriages reached into the Apgar, Fleming and Holly families. We can follow Don's line through Mary, but her brothers and sisters had entire lives of their own.

The same book recalls an earlier Balthazar Pickel who helped finance Lutheran worship at New Germantown. His precise connection to Julia's branch is still uncertain. But the family's presence in that community is striking beside the Melicks' own religious and village history, told elsewhere on this site.

A second ancestral thread: the Cooks

Cora's mother Sarah Frances Cook was the daughter of Jacob Cook and Sarah Ann McClary. An early-twentieth-century genealogy also carries this line toward John Abbott Cook and Elizabeth Able. So even “Cora Shaffer Beavers” reaches into several households: the Shaffers, Cooks and McClarys, and the relatives whose names rarely make it into a direct-line tree.

One farm ends a chapter; another begins

In early March 1936, Joseph died at Springdale Farm at sixty-five, after heart trouble. His wife Cora, mother Julia, daughters and siblings survived him. The newspaper reported that the funeral would be held at the farm itself. We know neither what Howard said nor what the house looked like. The record gives us the place, the partnership, and the people who remained.

Joseph and Cora's daughter Margaret married James Warren Melick. Their son Don grew up on the Homestead Road dairy farm near Oldwick—not Springdale Farm. They were different farms, and different households. Yet they belonged to the same inherited world of agriculture and family, with work and relationships continuing across generations.

A small obituary gave us the brothers' farm. An old census supplied the two Shaffer daughters. A genealogy restored the names of Julia's aunts and uncles. Together, those fragments reveal a fuller family than any single document could hold.