Philip Ginter, Summit Hill, Carbon County

Before I get started with today's post, I wanted to point out the nifty addition to this blog. You can now sign up for a mailing list to be notified by me personally when I post a new quest update. Just plug your contact info into the handy gizmo to the right of this post. I promise you won't hear from me more than three times a month, at most, and I won't ever use your contact info for anything else. You'll get links to the newest blog posts, some information about various events being arranged by historical groups in Pennsylvania, and sometimes little surprises. Like this one:

To properly inaugurate the mailing list, I'm conducting a giveaway! Who doesn't like free stuff? You know you do! So click here and I'll tell you all the details without clogging up this post.

Meanwhile, on with the regular programming. For today's adventure, we'll head back to Carbon County - haven't been there in a while - and read about a man whose name is spelled two ways. I first talked about Philip Ginter, or Ginder, in my post about the Carbon County marker, and at the time I promised I'd tell you more about him later. Well, it's later.

Lafayette, Bethlehem, Northampton County

May is here, and it's actually starting to look like it where I live! Several of my neighbors have planted fields of canola, and it's a massive lift to the spirits to drive to the grocery store past fields of beautiful yellow flowers, stretching for acres. I'm so grateful to the farmers who decided to put in that crop.

I didn't know what to write for today's post. I'm actually starting to run out of my backlog of 'saved' subjects; I've done all of the markers I've collected for several counties. (That's not to say that those counties are done, just that I need more material from them.) My younger sister lives with us, and I remarked that today I needed to do a blog post. She wanted to know if I've written about bread yet, which as my longtime readers know, I have not. I've made bread - yesterday was my first attempt at homemade bread and it went very well; I have dubbed it "existential bread" because we joke that people are baking to stave off the sensations of existential dread. I'm probably not as funny as I think I am.

Anyway, I gave her two possible topics for today's post and she picked the one you're about to read. So it's partly because of Liza that we're learning about the Marquis de Lafayette.