Shocky Family History

Though I am interested in all of my family, my favorite branch is the Shockeys. The main reason for this is my great-great-great-grandfather, Thomas Jefferson Shockey. No one seems to know where he is buried. We have been searching for his grave all of my life. Any information we can find about his family could help, so we are always trying to find more details. Another reason I like the Shockeys most is that we have two seven-hundred-page published books of history. I have learned many interesting stories about my ancestors this way.
The first Shockey we have knowledge of is Johann Christophel Schacke. He was born in the Palatinate area of Germany and moved to America when he was twenty-three. In America he went by the name of Christopher. In our book it says, “Christopher arrived in America aboard the ship “Molly” which had sailed from the port in Amsterdam, Holland, by way of Dover, England…. [He] landed in Philadelphia on ten September 1837” (D. Shockey, T. Shockey 2). This was during the time when a large number of Germans came to America. It is said that some of the best farmers in Germany were from Palatinate. This makes sense because up until my parents, most of the Shockeys were farmers. Christopher owned land in a lot of Pennsylvania. I found that, “[m]uch of the population which we know as Pennsylvania German today, came from a section of Germany called the Palatinate” (Aurand). It appears that my family was the typical German family but later, the Shockeys decided that rules didn’t apply to them.
Christopher’s son Valentine was the first to cause trouble. He was the leader of a gang and a counterfeiter. He and his cohorts made their money and hid from the law in a cave that came to be known as Shockey’s Cave. During one of his many encounters with the law, Valentine escaped to the cave while the police set fire to his house. They figured that would be enough to lure Valentine out of the woods. Valentine, instead, sat in the mouth of his cave and...