There are about 500 of them.
She decided to get the family together.
Seventy-three-year-old Faye Teluk has been trying to get in touch with relatives she hasn’t seen in more than 20 years. She also has been actively searching for the past five months via internet searches, social media posts, phone calls and letters for cousins whom she’s never met. All 500, spread all over the country, are the descendants of her great grandparents on her mother’s side, Robert and Grace Schake, who were married around 1900 and lived in Turtle Creek.
Grace when she married was only 14 years old. The couple had 16 children who are now deceased.
Ms. Teluk has been dreaming for the past four years of inviting all of Robert’s and Grace’s descendants to a family reunion and it’s finally going to happen on Oct. 23 at Emmanuel Reformed Church of Christ, formerly named Hills Church, in Export. About 115 family members will attend.
Her great-great-great-grandfather, Peter Hill, born in the early 1800s in that part of Westmoreland County, donated the land to build the church in 1846. His headstone is directly in front of the church steps in the now historical cemetery that surrounds it.
It wasn’t easy finding all of her relatives and COVID-19 prevented any plans to get together for the last couple of years. But she wouldn’t give up.
She has found each family with the help of her cousins and other family members and adds their names to a huge family tree she’s constructed on four pieces of posterboard. Every name she finds is a victory, and she’s expecting to make some corrections after cousins see the tree at the reunion. “It’s confusing to keep track of generations and construct a family tree with people you’ve never met,” she said.
Teluk’s expectations of the simple covered-dish reunion are that her relatives will be happy to meet and exchange family memories and maybe even to stay in touch better than they have in the past.
“Family is important to me … We’re not perfect but we are family.” For example, she has wonderful memories of her great grandma and wants her cousins and their children to know all about her, too. “Everyone loved to go to Grandma Schake’s house. Her apron was stiff from wiping little noses and she loved telling stories.”
Great Grandma Schake also loved baseball and the Pittsburgh Pirates. “The women in our family were the sports nuts… I knew about Roberto Clemente and his stats at an early age.”
Great Grandpap Schake had some interesting history, too. Before he and Grace raised 16 children of their own in Turtle Creek, he was one of 17 children. He liked to hunt and fish and had a camp on the property that would later become the Kinzua Dam in Warren County. He also played baseball and she recently discovered a photo of him in his late teens with a friend in their baseball uniforms.
Teluk said, “There is a lot of Schake DNA in Western Pennsylvania.”
Two of the Schake descendants recently found that out.
“One of my second cousins worked in Pittsburgh with a girl she didn’t realize she was related to. The girl posted a picture on Facebook of the Schakes’ children, and her co-worker saw it. ‘ How do you know him,’ she asked. ‘He’s my great uncle,’ the friend replied.”
One family member that Teluk was most eager to find was the son of the youngest of the 16 Schake siblings, Ida, who died shortly after the son was born in 1946. The family lost track of him until recently. He was happy to hear from them but is not able to attend the reunion.
Teluk, who lives in a small town in New York between Buffalo and Niagara Falls called Grand Island, can’t wait to get to Pittsburgh this week. While she’s here, she wants to plan for the next reunion in 2023, and she hopes that more of her relatives will be able to attend.
She says getting her family back together for a reunion has been worth her effort to find and get contact information for all 500 of them. And her rationale for wanting them to stick together, especially in times of turmoil, came often from her own mother.
“It’s good to have friends. But people need to be with their family,” she said. “It’s your family who will always have your back.”