Lawmaster, Loumaster, Lowmaster Family

In 1972, my great-uncle, Rev. Vane Henry Lowmaster, wrote a privately funded book simply called Lowmaster. I don't think he sold a single copy -- he simply handed them out to gifts to people who were interested. In it he recalled meeting someone named Lowmaster in Richmond, Va., and wondered if they were related. This author has taken that question and developed it. The initial premise was that all people named Lowmaster were related. That expanded to include variant spellings including Lawmaster and Loumaster.

These spellings don't necessarily represents degrees of relationships. In my own Lowmaster line, I am closer to some with the Loumaster or Lawmaster spelling than the Lowmaster spelling. The spelling is important in the digital age but not so in the 19 century. It simply reflected the pronunciation of the name. In western Pennsylvania in the 1960s my grandparents were referred to as Lau-master although by 2000 that seemed to morph into the Low-master pronunciation.

I started with the Social Security Death Index. My theory is that all of us have ancestors who are now in the SSDI. If I could link everyone named Lowmaster in the SSDI as being related, it's highly unlikely there are those living with the name who aren't related to us. By February 1, 2008, I had linked all 90 Lowmasters in the SSDI. There were eight Loumasters; all connected. And there are 42 Lawmasters.

The final, and I think most exciting piece of research, will be the sponsoring of the Laumeister DNA project. We will need male Lawmaster, Loumaster, Lowmaster, and Laumaster descendants to submit to a DNA test to see if (1) all markers are related and (2) if all lead back to Germany. More on that later.

Click here to view most people named Lawmaster, Lowmaster, Loumaster as well as a number of other descendants of Wendel Laumeister, 1750 Immigrant to York.