Balsbaugh Family Cemetery is in the woods on a steep hill on property that either is or used to be owned by the Sauffley family. It is about a mile east of Hanoverdale, in East Hanover Township, Dauphin County. The gravestone inscriptions are in German and most are difficult or impossible to read. Many stones are damaged or missing. It is the understanding of locals and the Historical Society that the cemetery was once on the top of the hill, and it is therefore believed that the stones have migrated down the steep incline. It is not known if the stones still mark the sites of the actual interments. This graveyard was restored in 2010 by volunteers from the Milton Hershey School with money from the Hershey Trust, and is currently being well kept by the property's owner.

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"The Balsbaugh Family

Among the earliest of the German settlers on Spring Creek, in what is now Derry Township, Dauphin County, was George Balsbaugh, a native of Fahrenbach, in the Pfaltz, Germany, where he was born in 1706.

He married Eva Minich, born in the same neighborhood, in 1716. With their little family they came to America in the year 1743, and located among their old neighbors in the Fatherland, near Derry Church, on the farm now owned by the late venerable Wendel Henry.

Mr. Balsbaugh subsequently removed to Hanover Township, six miles further north, and purchased a tract of land of two-hundred acres--most of it hilly and sterile--which has ever since been known as the 'Balsbaugh Place.'

Mr Balsbaugh died there in 1775, his wife ten years later. They had a large family, and their descendants were quite numerous in Dauphin and Lebanon counties sixty years ago, but like their Scotch-Irish neighbors, they have gone out from the old homestead and sought new locations south and west."

From Commemorative Biographical Encyclopedia of Dauphin County, Containing Sketches of Representative Citizens, and Many of the Early Scotch-Irish and German Settlers. Chambersburg, Pa.: J. M. Runk & Company, 1896, pages 86-87.