THE BROBST CHRONICLES
A HISTORY OF THE EARLY BROBST/PROBST
FAMILIES IN PENNSYLVANIA
Index
and Table of Contents to The Brobst Chronicles
Title Page
Foreword
Introduction
Chapter
One - The Early Swiss/German Probsts
Chapter
Two - The History Of The German Immigration To America
Chapter
Three - The Struggles of the Settlers
Chapter
Four - The Early American Pennsylvania Brobsts
Chapter Five - Children of Philipp Jacob Probst
Chapter Six - The Other Children of Philipp Jacob Probst
Chapter Seven: The Other Children of Christophel Probst
Chapter Eight: Other Interesting Brobstology Intermarriages
Appendices
Chapter I
THE EARLY SWISS/GERMAN PROBSTS
In the beginning there was Hans. Hans Probst,
that is. Or so we think. We start with one of the earliest known Swiss
Probsts - Hans, who was born (ca 1531) and raised in the city (Der Stadt)
Bern, Switzerland1.
The parents of Hans and of his older brother, Benedikt (ca 1529) are not
known.
"Bern" means "bears" in German, and it was known as the
"City of Bears". Bern is the capital of Switzerland and of Bern Kanton
(county), in mountainous west central Switzerland. In 1528, a dispute
with the Roman Catholic Church led to the official acceptance of Protestantism.
Bern is also the home of the historic 16th century Clock Tower.
As best we can tell, American Brobsts descended
from that Hans Probst. Benedikt, Hans' brother, produced a parallel chain
of Probsts, some of whom are known to have emigrated to the USA and settled
in Utah and elsewhere,2 and are documented in the archives
of the Mormon Church; many of them came to America via Bavaria. They did
not become "Brobsts".
But we may reach back further than the Swiss in the 1500s.
There is a report that the Probsts descend from an ancient Austrian family
which traces its ancestry as a family of Slav and Magyar origin before
the year 1100 and appears first in the ancient records in Austria. This
has not been researched, however. The name �Probst� was well known and
highly respected in Switzerland.
There were other Hans Probsts who lived in Bern (in the
�suburb� L�tzenfl�h) at that time, and the record is not too clear just
which Hans we descended from, or if we descended from him at all! We believe
it was the 1531 Hans, but the record is not clear. Also, there were Probsts
in Der Stadt Langnau, Switzerland, about 20 miles east of Bern, and in
Aarberg.
With a few exceptions, the Saxon "Propst" family (unrelated
to us) from northern Germany is not discussed in this report (see Appendix
4 about the Propsts).
Hans' son, Niklaus (b. 1554), and his brother,
Hans Michael (b. 1557), were also born in Bern, in the suburb (Dorf) of
Siselen. Niklaus (Nicklaus) and his wife, Margreth (b. 1556), had a big
family3: six boys
and six girls, all born in Bern (probably Siselen) between 1578 and 1604
(including Rudolph [b. 1595]).
It must be recorded that there is no firm
evidence that Rudolph was actually the son of Niklaus and Margreth. He
is not shown on the primary list of births in his church records, although
he fits nicely within that list.4
He could have been baptized in a different church, however, or
by an unidentified itinerant minister who recorded Rudolph's birth in
his own pastoral records. I have not attempted to resolve this speculative
question. So maybe it all began with Rudolph!
(I note, however, that Rudolph would have also fit nicely
into the family of Benedikt Probst, b. 1568 in the village of L�tzenfl�h,
Bern, and his wife Barbel nee Zimmerman, and that may be why some researchers
have placed him there. But that doesn't make either family the right place
for Rudolph! Benedikt's father was also Benedikt, b. abt 1551, whose father
was the same Benedikt, b 1529, mentioned earlier.)
Whatever his roots, Rudolph and his wife
(whose name is not known) were born about 1595 in the village of Siselen,
Kanton Bern, Switzerland. Around 1625, shortly after their marriage,
they left their Swiss home and moved nearly 150 miles northeast into
southwestern Bavaria, in Allg�u, to a little Schw�bish village called
"Ettischweyl im Allg�u" (later Ettisweiler; today it is Ettensweiler)5
, a small village a few miles southwest of Wangen in the parish
of Niederwangen (near Lake Constance, on the Swiss border, near to and
east of Zurich).
(Note: Wangen is near Kempten, after which Kempton, Berks
County, was named, and also near Schwangau, the home of the famous 1869
Neuschwanstein Castle after which the Disneyland Castle was modeled.)
What caused them to uproot themselves from their Swiss
homeland and their other family members to move to Wangen is not yet known,
but it may have been just the need to find their own "turf". The Thirty
Years War (1618-1648) decimated the population of Baden-Wurttemburg, Bavaria,
and Schwabia, and Rudolph may have just responded to the German call for
new settlers. The presiding duke of Bavaria and Schwabia promised the
new settlers to be free of taxes for some years if they would come to
replace the residents who had been killed and take over that land to produce
crops for the people and income for the duke. It may also have been that
Rudolph was seeking physical therapy treatments in the famous hot springs
of Wangen. A history of the town of Wangen may be found in Appendix 9
to this report. Why did he choose Wangen for his new home? There were
other Probsts there who had earlier arrived from Switzerland; a Justin
Probst lived there in the early 1500s and became quite famous as a leader
of the peasant uprisings (See Appendix 9).
They settled quickly into their new environment. Rudolph
became a "Gemeinsmann" (citizen) of Ettisweiler; he apparently was or
became a Roman Catholic, since there was no Protestant church nearby,
although the existing church records show no trace of Rudolph. Rudolph's
only son Bartholom�us (Bartholomew, shortened to "Barthel") was reportedly
born in Ettisweiler in 16266, just a year after their
arrival there. Rudolph died in Wangen in the mid-1600s.
The war ended in 1648. The 23-year-old Barthel, still unmarried,
responded to encouragement of the Pfalzgraf (Palatinate prince) for new
settlers. New immigrants were needed to replace the losses during the
wars, and had been promised freedom from taxes for some years. In 1652,
Barthel ("Bartholm�us" in the records) sold some land (probably his father's)
in Ettensweiler, and left for the flat, rich farmlands of the southern
Palatinate of Germany.
It's about 150 miles between Wangen and the lower Palatinate,
as the crow flies. Unfortunately, only the crow can travel straight in
that direction due to the mountains (Schwaben Alb) and the dense Black
Forest. So he floated down the Argen (river) to the Bodensee, and then
down the Rhine, west and then north, and settled in or near the little
village of Minfeld, just a few miles west of Kandel. His new home was
in southwestern Germany, near to and south of Landau, north of Zurich,
and west of Munich. Kandel lies on the Otterbach river, a tributary of
the nearby Rhine, about fifteen miles west-northwest of Karlsr�he, in
the Germersheim area of Rheinland-Pfalz, and about seven miles north of
the French border of Alsace. There he met and married Susanna (nee Fischer)
Negel, widow of Herr Negel.
(Note: throughout this discussion, I use the terms "Palatinate"
and "Pfalz" interchangeably. "Palatine" is merely the English translation
of "Pfalz". The names of the towns in this area, on both sides of the
border, are a curious mix of German and French.)
After their wedding in Kandel, Barthel and Susanna (Barthel
was her second husband),7 had eight children, all born
in or near Kandel and/or Minfeld: Hans Michel I (1654), Hans Michael II
(1655), Hans Jacob (1658), Christophel (b. 1661)8, Hans
Barthel (1664), Utilia (1666), Hans Georg (b. 1668), and Johannes (b.
1671). In 1997, the author noted during a visit to that area that no Probsts
currently live in Kandel or Minfeld, although there were twenty of them
in nearby Karlsr�he.
Christophel was the father of the first early German immigrants
who came to America. He was a master potter ("Meister Topfer"), as were
his father-in-law and several of his sons. Chris tophel and his wife Eva
Christina (nee Hoffman) Probst9 raised ten children
between 1690-1712: Johannes (1690), Philipp Jacob (1692), Zacharias (1695),
Maria Catharina (1697), Anna Maria Margaretha (1699), Johann Michael (1701),
Elisabeth Margaretha (1703), Johann Christopherus (1706), Eva Christina
(1707), and Maria Sarah (1711), all born in Minfeld (Kandel)10.
Christophel remained in Kandel, and died there in 1719 while several of
his children were still minors.
"Who we are is who we were" (From the film "Amistad")
At the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, there
is a sign which states that one Christophel Probst gave assistance to
the Jews in Germany in the 1940s; perhaps this benefactor too was a descendant
of the earlier Christophel! It may also have been the Christopher Probst
who was executed by the Nazis in February 1943; he was one of a group
of Munich students caught while dropping leaflets from a gallery into
the main lobby of the University, calling upon German people to free their
country from the criminal dictatorship that governed them, to demand an
end to persecution of the Jews, and to demand peace.
It is noted that at the time when Philipp Jacob Probst,
his French Huguenot wife C'erine, and his three sons came to America,
they were French citizens, living in Bas Rhin, Alsace, just over the French
border from Kandel. Later records of the Kandel church show that there
were Probsts living there as late as the early 1800s. In addition, there
were many Probsts living in southern Alsace (Haut Rhin), having emigrated
there from Switzerland in the 1600s and 1700s.
There is voluminous information on record on these old births/deaths/marriages
from the 1600s and 1700s in Kandel. We have been privileged to have the
benefit of much research done by Brobst researchers such as Alice-Ann
Askew and by Werner Esser of Kandel11.
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REFERENCES:
1. Parish Records (Archives); Dr. Robert
Oehler, Kasernenstr. 21D, Bern, Switzerland , courtesy Alice Ann Askew
*** [return]
2. "CHURCH", a publication of the Mormon
Church, Salt Lake City, UT, July 15, 1978. ** [return]
3. Parish Records (Oehler) *** [return]
4. The birth records show six girls and
five boys, without Rudolph, but with a gap in the birth record from 1590
(Anni) to 1597 (Elsbeth). They had babies every year or two, so this is
an unusually long gap between births! Perhaps Rudolph's birth record is
just missing. But there is a reasonable question of whether Rudolph was
in fact a son of Niklaus and Margreth. **[return]
5. Private correspondence from Stadtarchiv,
Grosse Kreisstadt Wangen im Allg�u, 20 January 1998 *** [return]
6. Parish Records (Oehler) *** [return]
7. German (Kandel) Marriage Archives from
the year 1653, Entry #111 under the name "Probst" [[email protected]]
indicate the marriage of Susanna Negel, widow of Isaac Negel, to Barthel
Propst on January 18, 1653 *** [return]
8. Kandel Baptismal Records for the year
1661 show the birth date of Christophel Probst. *** [return]
9. Kandel Marriage Records for the year
1690 show the marriage of Christophel Probst to Eva Christiana, daughter
of Hans-Michael Hof. ***[return]
10. Correspondence from Mary Brobst in
Yale, Iowa, dated Feb 23, 1993, gives the birth date as 1699. ** [return]
11. Werner Esser [[email protected]];
contact courtesy of Carol Gilliland and Bo Breneman [return]
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This page was last updated on Monday, 21-Feb-2011 18:19:15 MST
Copyright© 1998-2011 by The National Brobst Family Historical Registry
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