We have established this Web Page so that BROYLES/BRILES researchers may have a place to access contributions from other researchers, and have a place to deposit their own GEDCOM files. We would like for you to drop us an e-mail. Let us know if you find anything of value here.
Once we get the main BROYLES/BRILES database up and running, we intend to include links to other related families: WILHOIT/WILHITE, BLANKENBAKER/BLANKENB�HLER, YEAGER/YAGER, KOPP/COPP/CUPP, FLESHMAN/FLEISCHMANN, WAYLAND, KINDLE, BIRD/BYRD, WALTERS, PAINTER, FOX, FILLERS/FELLERS/G'FELLERS, HOLT and others.
The Story
Johannes Breyhel, son of Conrad and Margaretha (Schelling) Breyhel, was christened 1 May 1679, in Du�lingen (Dusslingen), W�rttemberg (Wuerttemberg), just south of T�bingen (Tuebingen) in present day Germany.
For reasons unknown he moved about 50 miles away to �tisheim (Oetisheim), probably around 1700 where on 6 Nov 1703 he married Ursula RUOP, daughter of a local grave digger. It is in �tisheim that they raised their family. A number of their children died as infants: Conrad (who was a twin to Hans Jacob), Mattheus, and probably also Jerg Martin. In the tradition of the times they used the name Conrad again for their fourth child.
Johannes and family emigrated to Virginia in the summer of 1717, with about twenty other families from nearby villages. Gov. Spotswood of Virginia, who paid their passage in return for an indenture of seven years, settled them at "Germanna" where he had located an earlier group of German immigrants in 1714. (Germanna is located where Virginia Rte. 3 crosses the Rapidan River west of Fredericksburg.)
Johannes proved his importation to America on 2 May 1727, as John BRYOLL. It was about this time that many of the Germanna immigrants moved to present day Madison Co., VA, took up land, and founded the Hebron Lutheran Church. John's son Jacob (Hans Jacob) was the progenitor of the Broyles family, and son Conrad was progenitor of the Briles family.
It is believed that Johannes and Ursula had additional children on this side. They were certainly young enough. Based on the records of land sales, it is certain that Adam Wilheit's wife Catherine was a daughter of Johannes and Ursula. She would have been born circa 1720. One probable son, "Christley Browel", is mentioned in the 1739 tithable list of Orange Co., VA. From this it would be expected that he was born circa 1718. He must have died or left the area by 1744, the year Jacob and Conrad sold their part of their father's farm. Based on the order of tax taking and comparing it to the Carpenter map of original land patents in Madison Co. (nicely updated in a recent Beyond Germanna), Christley seems to have been living with Matthias Smith, or nearby.
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In 1990, Johni Cerny and Gary Zimmerman of Lineages, Inc., Salt Lake City, located the ancestral
homes of many of the Germanna colonists. They did this by searching the German church records of villages surrounding the known home of one of the immigrants. Fortunately for us, they found Johannes and Ursula! Booklet
#6 of the series Before Germanna contains the information they found. The booklets can be purchased from Heritage Quest. (For an on-line listing of the books, you can check their catalog of Virginia books and look for the title.)
Steve Broyles has verified and extended the
work of Cerny and Zimmerman. Be sure to check this out. Here you can see copies of the original church records of our ancestors, in the original German, and translated into English.
The road to truth in genealogical research is seldom a straight course. Over the years a number of mistakes and mis-interpretations have been made, some of which persist despite the presence of new information.
We'd like to know which branches of the BROYLES/BRILES family you are researching, and we would like to have your contributions in the form of a GEDCOM file. You may attach the GEDCOM to an e-mail to us and we will convert it to an HTML and add a link to it on this main page. Please include in your e-mail any information you would like to appear in the description for the link to your GEDCOM, e.g., your name, address, e-mail address, branch of the family, personal information, etc. For your convenience, we have provided the "Guest Book" so that you may sign-in and we may get to know you. (Any information you provide here will come directly to me, George W. Durman, and will not appear anywhere on the Web Site without your permission. It is for my information only.)
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The Researchers
Pioneering work on the families of the second Germanna Colony including the Broyles/Briles lines was done by Dr. Arthur Leslie Keith, and published in several issues of the William and Mary Quarterly early in the 1900s. He was also the author of a full typewritten manuscript on the entire Broyles/Briles family. Running to hundreds of pages, a copy of this work is found at the Mormon Library in Salt Lake City, and it is available on microfilm from the Library of Congress.
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Myths and Fallacies
Some genealogies have John's wife as Ursula BLANKENBAKER. This error was the result of undocumented conjecture by an elderly researcher, who has since passed away and her errors have been corrected.
Some researchers claim that a second John BROYLES proved his importation in November 1719. James E. Brown has debunked the "second John Broyles"" story in a recent article in Beyond Germanna (v.7, n.5, Sept. 1995). He has given the results of his studies of the importation records, in which he tried to find the supposed 1719 importation of John 2; he couldn't find a second John. Instead he did find a John Bell that sort of looked like John Broyles. This was apparently misread as a John Broyles, and led to the John 2 theory. (Another erroneous myth hopefully dispensed with, once and for all.)
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