Schake family can trace roots back to Hill's Church founding in Murrysville

The Emmanuel Reformed United Church of Christ in Murrysville often goes by the much shorter moniker of Hill’s Church.

But where did the nickname originate?

On Oct. 23, more than 100 people who can trace their lineage back to one of the men who donated the land for the church gathered there for a reunion.

They are descendants of Robert and Grace (Hill) Schake, who were married around 1900, had 16 children and lived in Turtle Creek, where some members of the family still reside.

Grace’s grandfather was Peter Hill, an elder in the original church community and one of two men in the 1800s who donated the land where the church was built.

“He held Bible classes in his barn, and his headstone is placed in the front of the doors to the church in the historic cemetery,” said Schake family member Faye Teluk.

Hill was the son of German immigrants, born in 1786 and married at the age of 18 to Esther Geiger, another surname that shows up regularly in the Murrysville area, according to George H. Hoffman Jr.’s “History of Emmanuel Reformed United Church of Christ.”

Teluk is Hill’s great-great-great-granddaughter, and she spent months reaching out to more than 500 Schake family descendants, ultimately bringing together about 115.

“It allowed people to meet family members they didn’t know,” Teluk said. “Two women worked for a year at the same business in Pittsburgh and only recently realized they’re second cousins.”

Emmanuel Pastor Joseph Hedden Jr. said he wished he’d met some of the Schake family members as he was working on a book about the church’s history.

“I joked with one of the ladies that she could’ve filled in a lot of gaps and saved me a lot of my research,” Hedden said. “We didn’t have a whole lot of stuff that they could dig into for their own genealogical research, but we have some quilts here that are more than 100 years old, so we put those on display to see if people recognized any of the names.”