Recently I learned that my mom’s great-grandfather John Grundtisch served as a driver for hotel owner Henry E. Hershey just outside of Harrisburg, PA in 1880.

Yes, he worked for the Hershey family, the same extended Hershey family of chocolate fame.

Henry E. Hershey was owner of the Park Hotel, Stockyard Hotel & the Hershey House in the 1870s/1880s and he was a prominent businessman in Dauphin County (the same county where Hershey PA lies today). He was a distant relative to Milton S. Hershey, founder of the famous Hershey Chocolate Company, which didn’t even exist at the time. The first Hershey bar was produced 20 years later in 1900. Perhaps they both had an entrepreneurial gene in their DNA.

This discovery was made thanks to revisiting census records, and previously I glossed over who John was living with after finding him on the 1880 U.S. Census. Sure enough, he is recorded in Susquehanna Twp, Dauphin Co, PA living with Henry E. Hershey, age 33, Hotel Keeper, wife Mary, 33, and their 6 children. He is recorded as “John Gruntish” (sic), age 25, boarder, driver, born in Bavaria, parents born in Bavaria.

Along the way, in making this discovery, I learned some other interesting things:

• The Hershey surname actually has Swiss origins, and it is spelled Hirschi in Switzerland
• Interestingly, the Grundtisch family also had Swiss origins, where the name is spelled Grundisch, before the family moved to the Pfalz (southwest Germany) in the 1700s
• John Grundtisch himself was born in the Pfalz (Bavaria), but immigrated with his parents when he was 5 years old, so he did most of his schooling in the United States and spoke English as well as German
• Henry E. Hershey, who employed John Grundtisch in 1880, “enjoyed traveling” per his obituary in 1922 in the Harrisburg Telegraph, from Canada to Florida, and that may have been part of why he employed a driver
• John Grundtisch’s future wife, and my great-great-grandma Mary Baker, was from Delphos, Ohio, while Dauphin County, PA is in eastern Pennsylvania, quite a distance between them to marry and have their first child by 1885 – I often wondered how they met, but if John was a driver, perhaps his travels took him to Fort Wayne, Indiana, just beyond Delphos, and he met Mary along the way
• Another nugget from Henry E. Hershey’s death notice – he was prominent in Masonic circles, and I know this also to be true for John Grundtisch, who went on to be a very successful businessman as a live stock commercial agent, which took him to Pittsburgh PA and then eventually to Buffalo NY where he settled – he may have been introduced to the Knights Templar from Henry Hershey

No wonder my family likes chocolate so much 🙂 There’s our roundabout link to the Hersheys of PA.