We'll make this note into a quiz.  I am predicting that most of you will not do well.  Ready?

1. Who is the highest paid athlete in the world?
2. What sport does he participate in?
3. What annual sport has the largest audience in the world?

Here are a few clues.  The highest paid athlete does not spell his name Shoemaker.  While he is competing, he is sitting down.  The largest audience is not for the Super Bowl.

The man is Michael Schumacher, and he earns about $81,000,000 dollars a year, before the endorsement money rolls in.  The sport is Formula One auto racing.

Before he retires, he is expected to set new records in all categories of Formula One racing.  At the start of the 2002 season, Schumacher had won 53 Grand Prix races, the most of any driver ever.  He is wildly acclaimed by German citizens who have had a drought of Formula One winning drivers.  They say it doesn't matter what the capabilities of the car are.  When he gets into a car, his sheer force of will propels the car.

The sport events which draw the largest crowds are the Olympics and World Soccer, but they are not held annually.  The Super Bowl, it is said, draws an audience of about 135 million.  Formula One racing draws an average TV audience of 300 million per race.  There are now fourteen Grand Prix races per year.  At an earlier time this year, Schumacher had won nine of these races for the year, with some races yet to be run.

Formula One refers to the specifications for the cars entered in the race.  It is the top, or fastest, class of car, if you want to call them cars.  At least they have four wheels and an engine.

Schumacher got his start in Go-Kart racing at the age of 4.  That was in 1973, so he has been racing for almost twenty years.  His relaxation?  He still loves to race Go-Karts.

His favorite dessert?  Kaiserschmarrn which is made with fried plums.

In the same issue of �German Life� as yesterday�s note was taken from, there is an article by Robert A. Selig on the life of servants in Eighteenth-Century Germany.  In short, you would not want, in a reincarnation, to come back as a servant in the Eighteenth Century.  There were several categories of servants, some of them as short term jobs, and some of them in a life time of hard work.  In general, we are talking about maids, farmhands, coachmen, and domestic servants.

In order to give some meaning to the wages, here are the costs of a few things.

1. A sheep, 2 � guilders,
2. a hog, about 8 guilders,
3. a calf, 12 guilders,
4. a cow, 15 to 20 guilders,
5. a spinning wheel, 1 guilder,
6. a weaving loom, 18 guilders,
7. a bed, 20 guilders.

In 1732, a marriage permit cost 250 guilders in W�rzburg.

The tone for the treatment of the servants was summarized by Christian Friedrich Schubart in �Teutsche Chronik�, in 1774, as follows:

�Who will bother with the servants?  Let them work like cattle, throw their food out to them as you would throw it to a dog, chase them into church services and to communion and let them hear and receive there what they don�t understand, give them, or withhold from them, their wages as you like, and, after they have broken their bones in your service, throw them into the workhouse.�

Harsh as this sounds, it came close to the truth.  There was wealth in the Eighteenth Century, the age of splendor, of baroque palaces and churches, and other ostentatious displays of wealth.  At the same time, it was an age of abject poverty.  Population had grown rapidly after The Thirty Years� War in the previous century and there were too many people for the resources.  And, the distribution of the capital was very uneven.

Domestics, stable hands, coachmen, and lackeys were ubiquitous.  The city of Nuremberg, one of the largest population centers of the German empire with 25,000 inhabitants, had a domestic servant population of 5,000 or twenty percent of the population.  On the eve of secularization in 1803, 23 servants cared for 29 clerics at Oberzell near W�rzburg.  It is hard to tell from the numbers given us just how pervasive the servant class was.  The hamlet of B�chhold with 344 inhabitants had 36 of the people listed as servants.  But at the same time, the Magistrate of B�chhold listed the servants' employers as �mostly beggars.�  (That is, the Magistrate considered the "citizens" of B�chhold as little better off than the "servants" of the "citizens".  A sad case, indeed!)
(22 Nov 02)

How did the servant class arise?  By the Eighteenth Century, the land had been divided so much among the heirs that it became impossible to divide it further.  This was the result of the increase in population.  (The population of W�rzburg increased from 160,000 to 310,000 in the Eighteenth Century.)  Young men, such as Johann Georg Braungardt, whose parents owned neither land nor a home in Winterhausen, had to hire themselves out as farmhands.

The women outnumbered the men in the servant class by perhaps three to one.  Orphanages were one source of servant labor.  A child was raised in the orphanage until he/she was, perhaps as teenager or even younger, sent out to earn a living as a servant.  Vagrant children on the streets, or, in some cases, taken from their parents because of a lack of care for them, followed the path to the orphanage, and on to being a servant.

Only a few servants had annual contracts or agreements.  Six months was more common.  On the farms, it was less than this; it was only for the duration of the peak harvest season.

This note will vary from some of the traditional fare but it is still related to the Germanna Colonies.  For a few years, I have had a very primitive web page which I kept updated by typing at the keyboard.  There were no photos or images to slow things down and that was the advantage of it.

I decided, though, that it was time that I brought my web page into the modern world.  For a few days now I have had the rudiments of a new page up.  There is still a long way to go.  I was not even sure how much information I could store in my allotted ten megs of space on the host server.  Now that I have some pages with a small number of images, I have a better feel for how much can be included.

John Hoffman, of the First Colony, in his Bible recorded the fact that he married his second wife, Maria Sabina Folg, on July 13, 1729.  The first child of this marriage was Nicholas, named after one of the sponsors, Nicholas Jaeger (J�ger or Yager).  A second sponsor was Baltz Blankenbuechler.  A third sponsor was "the mother of my wife".  Since there were no Folg family in the Germanna community, the question was unanswered of who the "mother of my wife" was.  For the first seven children, ending with Frederick in 1740, the "mother of my wife" was a sponsor.  She presumably died between the eighth child in 1742 and Frederick in 1740.  Her name was never mentioned, only the relationship is given.

Her actual identity remained a mystery until Margaret James Squires found the story in the H�ffenhardt Church Registers.  The story has its complications.  I start with the marriage of Johann Michael Volck to Anna Maria Unknown, about 1685.  They were the parents of at least seven children, from 1687 to 1704.  The death of Anna Maria Volck is not recorded in the church records, but there was much turmoil in the region and there are gaps in the church books.

Next, Johann Michael Volck (who lived on the Wagonbach farm) married Anna Barbara Majer (or Maier, or Mayer, as the "i", "j", and "y" were used interchangeably; also, a final "s" was sometimes added).  This was in 1709 at H�ffenhardt.  Three children were born to this marriage:

1. Maria Sabina Charlotta Barbara, b. 19 March 1710,
2. Louisa Elisabetha, b. 23 March 1711,
3. Maria Rosina, b. 22 August 1712.

Johann Michael Volck died 7 April 1714, at the age of 51 years.

The widow, Anna Barbara (Majer) Volck married Johann Georg Utz on 10 Jul 1714.  Two children were born in Germany:

4. Ferdinand, b. 3 April 1715,
5. Johannes, b. 25 July 1716.

The Utz family is in the head rights used by Alexander Spotswood to pay for some of his land.  The Utz name is given there as Otes, but a mistake was made in describing the members of the family.  There are Hans Jerich Otes (Johann Georg Utz), Parvara Otes (Anna Barbara Majer Utz), Ferdinandis Sylvania Otes (this combines the son Ferdinand with his half-sister, Maria Sabina Charlotta Barbara Volck), and Anna Louisa Otes (presumably Louisa Elisabetha Volck).  The fate of the other two Volck daughters and the son Johannes Utz is unknown.

So, the mysterious "mother of my wife" was Anna Barbara Majer Volck Utz/Otes, or, as she would have been known in the First Colony, Anna Barbara Utz/Otes.  That's why it was difficult to identify "the mother of my wife", the wife being Maria Sabina Folg; there was no Folg/Volck family in the First Colony, but there was an Utz/Otes family!

Picking up some of the earlier history of the previous note, the parents of Johann Michael Volck were Michael Volck and Margaretha Albrect (or Albrecht).  The grandfathers of Johann Michael Volck were Martin Volck and Hans Georg Albrect.  Johann Michael Volck was born 29 January 1663 at Wagonbach.  This last piece of information is from Gary Zimmerman and Johni Cerny in the Before Germanna series.

Anna Barbara Majer's father was Hans Majer of Wolfartweyher, which has not been identified, at least to the extent that we have not been able to identify the Majer family.

In speaking of dates and calendars, the church records in Germany say that Maria Sabina Volck was christened 19 Mar 1710.  John Hoffman in his family Bible said that her birthday was 29 Mar 1710.  There was an eleven-day difference between the old style calendar in Virginia and the new style calendar in Germany.  Is this the answer?  No, it isn't.  The date 19 Mar 1710 in Germany would have been 8 Mar 1709 in Virginia.  (The old style calendar was running late by eleven days and the new year did not start until March 25.)  This is not an unusual case and we are left wondering what the explanation of such situations are.

Zimmerman and Cerny found the birth record of Hans Jorg (Johann Georg) Utz at Haundorf (born at Seiderzell though).  He was christened 12 April 1693.  So Anna Barbara Majer was married to two men, born at significantly different times.  Her first husband was born in 1663 and her second husband was born in 1693, a thirty-year difference.  If she was 15 years of age when she married Johann Michael Volck in 1709, then she was born in 1694 and would have been about the same age as George Utz.  If she was about the same age as Johann Michael Volck, then she would have been significantly older than George Utz.

For a variety of excellent reasons, several of us would like to find the history of Anna Barbara Majer, but all efforts have been frustrated so far.  She apparently died about 1741, when she ceased being a sponsor for the children of John Hoffman and Maria Sabina Volck.

Let me mention briefly the children of John Hoffman by his first wife, Anna Catharine H�ger.  The sponsor at the birth of the first child was Agnes, the sister of his wife, Anna Catharine H�ger.  At the second child, the witness was John's father-in-law, Henry H�ger.  The third child, Anna Catherine, had the sponsor Anna Catherine H�ger, the mother of his wife.  For the fourth child, John, the sponsor was John Fischbach, who had married Agnes H�ger and, therefore, was the brother-in-law of the mother.  My point is that all of these sponsors were relatives by blood or by marriage.  None of them were chosen as friends.
(27 Nov 02)

For the baptisms of the four children by his first wife, John Hoffman had only one sponsor for each, and this person was a relative.  This is not unusual in the Reformed faith.  For the twelve children by his second wife, John had three sponsors, generally.  This was probably because Maria Sabina Volck was of the Lutheran faith, where they favored multiple sponsors.  Both the Reformed and the Lutherans like to have relatives, blood or marriage, for sponsors.  Let's take a look at the sponsors for the twelve children by Maria Sabina (incidentally, all of the twelve lived).

1. For the son Nicholas:  Nicholas Yager, Balthasar Blankenbaker, and "my wife's mother";
2. For the son Michael:  Nicholas Yager, Balthasar Blankenbaker, and "my wife's mother";
3. For the son Jacob:  Nicholas Yager, Balthasar Blankenbaker, and "my wife's mother";
4. For the son Baltz:  Nicholas Yager, Balthasar Blankenbaker, and "my wife's mother";
5. For the son William:  Nicholas Yager, Balthasar Blankenbaker, and "my wife's mother";
6. For the son George:  Nicholas Yager, Balthasar Blankenbaker, and "my wife's mother";
7. For the son Frederick:  Nicholas Yager, Balthasar Blankenbaker, and "my wife's mother";
8. For the son Henry:  Nicholas Yager, Balthasar Blankenbaker, and Balthasar's wife;
9. For the son Tilman:  Nicholas Yager, Balthasar Blankenbaker, and Balthasar's wife;
10. For the daughter Elizabeth:  Nicholas Yager and Nicholas' wife, Susanna; and Anna Margaretha Blankenbaker (the wife of Balthasar);
11. For the daughter Anna Margaretha:  Balthasar Blankenbaker, and Balthasar' s wife; and the wife of Nicholas Yager;
12. For the daughter Maria:  Nicholas Yager, and Georgia (?) his wife; and the wife of Baltz Blankenbaker.

Only once was Nicholas Yager not chosen.  Only once was Balthasar Blankenbaker not chosen.  When Maria Sabina's mother died (we presume), she was replaced by Anna Margaretha Blankenbaker.  Susanna Yager was born a Clore, married a Weaver, married a Crigler, and then married Nicholas Yager.

Perhaps you would like to note that Balthasar Blankenbaker had land adjacent to George Utz, and George's wife, who was the mother of Maria Sabina.  Since the maiden name of Anna Margaretha Blankenbaker is unknown, many of us are led to the thought, almost to the conclusion, that she was closely related to Anna Barbara Majer Volck Utz.  Very possibly, they were sisters.  Probably, Maria Sabina, in naming a daughter Anna Margaretha, chose someone who was close to her.

But why Nicholas Yager?  His history never speaks of anyone who is related to Maria Sabina Volck Hoffman, but her first child is named after him.  I will feel very uncomfortable with Nicholas' history until I knew the answer to the question, "Why was Maria Sabina's first child named after him."
(28 Nov 02)

To the best of my knowledge, Margaret James Squire was the first to find who �the mother of my wife� was.  The reference, of course, is to Mrs. George (Anna Barbara Majer [Volck/Folg]) Utz.  This was a surprise to many people.

How did she find this information?  She was looking through the German Church records when she came across the information.  It was not her family, but she recognized the name, and knew how it fit into the Germanna picture.  Did she have any special talent for reading these German records?  Not that I know of.  I believe she was self-taught, and developed her skills through practice.  She also found the people who came from Neuenbuerg (the Fleshmans, Scheibles, Thomases, Schlucters, and the Blankenbakers).  And she worked on the Zimmermans (not the Carpenters) from Sulzfeld.  Sponsors for one of the Zimmerman kids included a Ludwig Fisher, and an Anna Barbara Fisher.  This certainly set my imagination running in high gear.

The records in H�ffenhardt, for the Volcks and Utzes, say that Hans Georg Utz came from Haundorf.  I don�t believe that Mrs. Squires followed through on this, but Gary Zimmerman and Johni Cerny, of Lineages, Inc., did.  They found the Utz family in Haundorf and the adjacent villages of Seiderzell, K�hnhardt, Mosbach, and Bergnerzell.  They added to the history of the Utz family from there.  These latter five villages are in Bavaria, though not by much.

I had the good fortune to visit these villages last May.  In Bergnerzell, I asked if there were any Utzes living there.  A man, of whom I asked this, sort of laughed, and went into the inn to get a telephone book.  Then he showed me about a page and a half with the name Utz.

I spent a few hours recently trying to read some of the old German Church microfilm.  In the baptismal records, the name of the child was easy.  Some of the names were written rather strangely, such as Hanss, with the "double s", e.g., Han�.  The given names of the parents were not really bad.  The surnames, which varied a lot, and many of them I had never seen before, were harder.  I was looking for a particular surname, Maier, as they spelled it.  That was not too hard, and I was able to find four children and the marriage of the parents.  I found one child, which was interesting to me, especially, but then he had died at the age of two.  The hard part of the record was reading the names of the sponsors.  The pastor started getting sloppy in his writing, and it was almost impossible to read these.  The same was true of the marriage records, after the names of the bride and groom.  But, perhaps, the most important thing is to practice, practice, and practice more.  Now just to find the time to do this.
(30 Nov 02)

Woodford B.Hackley prepared a map showing the lands of the twelve German families comprising the Little Fork German Church as of 1748.  I can't repeat the map, but I thought I could run through the names.

There were two Fishbacks.  Jacob Fishback, who was born in 1703 at Seelbach, a village next to Trupbach, from where the Philip Fishback family of the 1714 group came.  Jacob married Anna Catharina Holdinghaus on 4 June, 1734, and, for a "honeymoon", sailed for America, arriving at Philadelphia later in the year.  Apparently, Jacob and Anna had two sons, John and Frederick, and perhaps one or more daughters.  The picture is confusing, for the genealogists because the Philip Fishback family had descendants, with the names John and Frederick, who lived not too far away.  The two Fishback families, one from Trupbach and one from Seelbach, were probably related, but the connection is not proven.  The son Frederick, of Jacob, had moved away from Culpeper by 1784, and nothing more is known of him.  The son John, of Jacob, was born in 1743, and is called John, Sr.  Apparently, John, Sr. had three sons, John, Jr.; James; and William.

Harmann M�ller and his older brother, Johann Friedrich Mueller, emigrated to America on the ship Oliver, in 1738.  This was an unfortunate choice, as about two out of three people on the ship did not live to land in Virginia.  Apparently, a young son of John Frederick and his wife, Anna Maria Arnd, did not survive.  It would be hard to say, with any certainty, whether Anna Maria survived or not, as John Frederick's wife had the name Anna Maria in Germany, and Mary in his will.  Mary or Maria is too common a name to be sure.  Harmon married a daughter of Jacob Holtzclaw, and was given land by Holtzclaw.  Perhaps both John Friedrich and Harmon/Harmann lived on this land.  Both men moved to the south of Virginia about 1760/64.

A third German family in the Little Fork area was James Spilman, but I am unable to give any reasonable story on him and his family.  Perhaps others can do so.

Harman Bach, or Back, came also in 1738.  He was born in 1708, so he was thirty at the time.  He married Anna Margarethe Hausmann on 3 January, 1737, and a daughter was born in March.  Very soon after arrival, he was living in the Little Fork area.  In 1748 he was deeded 100 acres by Jacob Holtzclaw.  He sold the land in the Little Fork area, in 1789, when he was 80 years old, and moved to Garrard County, Kentucky, where he died in 1799.  Again, it is difficult to affirm that his wife from Germany survived the trip.

As I go through these names, my stories may be in error or incomplete.  If anyone can add to what I have written, please step up to the plate.
(02 Dec 02)

In the previous note, though we only discussed three families, one could get the feeling that there were relationships among the families, both between the immigrants and the people already here.  Another family in this category is George Wayman.  He was born in 1703 at Freudenberg, and emigrated, in 1738, on the ship Oliver, along with his cousin Harman Bach.  George was unmarried at the time.  He acquired property in the form of a life lease on the upper side of Little Indian Run from William Beverley after about a year here.  A son Joseph would appear to have been born about 1745.  George fell behind on his land payments and James Spilman took over the land.  In 1754, Jacob Holtzclaw deeded 98 acres in the middle of the Little Fork to George.  However, George and his wife Catherine sold this land in 1760 to Henry Huffman.

Catherine Wayman's maiden name is unknown.  Since her children, Harman, Henry, and Mary, married descendants of the Second Colony, the question arises as to whether she might have been from that group.  The daughter Mary married Adam Utz, and Catherine seems to have been living in the Robinson River Valley in 1776.  Catherine gave a full deed to Adam Utz for a female slave on the condition that the slave be maintained for the rest of her life by Adam.  Another child of Catherine and George Wayman was Joseph, who lived all of his life near Jeffersonton in the Little Fork.

The son, Henry Wayman, of George and Catherine, married Magdalena Blankenbaker; however, the story is more complicated than that and it could form a subject for a few notes in itself.

When you hear the name Henry Huffman, you are apt to think of the Henry who was the brother of the 1714 John Huffman.  They did have the same name, but they lived in different localities.  Henry, brother of John, lived in the Robinson River Valley.  He arrived in America in 1743.  The other Henry Huffman lived in the Little Fork, and I believe is sometimes called the Little Fork Huffman.  He is the one we will talk about this time.

His full name was Hans Henrich Hofmann and he was christened on 22 Sept 1712.  When he was 22 years of age, he came to Virginia (in 1734).  He was from Bockseifen, a very small village about two miles north of Freudenberg.  My map does not indicate that it has a church, and in the Eighteenth Century it was in the parish of Freudenberg, so we have another immigrant from Freudenberg.  Several of the people in the Little Fork would have smiled had you said Freudenberg to them.

Henry had a younger brother, who came later in 1737.  This brother, Matthias Hofmann, became a Moravian and lived in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.  He came on the ship Nancy, which also brought Joseph Coons.  Since the Moravians were not established until several years later, it is not clear how Matthias became aware of them and reached the decision to throw in his lot with them.  Whenever the Moravian missionaries came to Germantown or to the Little Fork, they brought a message of greeting to Henry Huffman from his brother.

Hans Henrich Hofmann, to use his baptismal name, married Anna Margarethe of Seelbach, on 4 June 1734.  They too must have left almost immediately for American for they landed in Philadelphia on 23 Sept 1734.  (Actually, by the standards of that time, they made good time.)  Henry Huffman died in 1783 in Culpeper County.  His wife appears in the tax rolls until 1792/3.  The first year in which Henry appeared in the Virginia records was in 1741, when he was administrator of John Huffman of Orange County.  This John seems to be a cousin of Henry who came later.  By 1764, Henry was on the tax rolls with 950 acres of land.  He was at the time a Lieutenant in the Militia.

Henry left a will in which the children Tillman, John, Henry, Harman, Elizabeth (married to John Young), Catherine, James, Mary, Elsbeth (distinct from Elizabeth), Alice, Susanna, and Eva.

The way to get a response from the subscribers to this List is to make an erroneous statement.  By now we know that Harman Wayman had about a dozen children, thanks to Cathi Clore Frost's submission.  The lesson to me is that I failed to read all of the words in a sentence and quoted only a part of it.

John Young, born Johannes Jung on 29 Feb 1693 [How could there be a 29 Feb in a year which is not a leap year?  Don't ask me.], at Trupbach, arrived in Philadelphia, on 23 Sept 1734, with his wife (Anna Maria) and three children.  In his ancestry, John Young has a Holtzclaw family member.  I have not been dealing with the relationships of these Little Fork people and the earlier immigrants, but there were several connections.  Most likely, Jacob Holtzclaw was writing to relatives and friends in the old country and inviting them to come to Virginia.

The Moravian missionaries often tried to make contact with Henry Huffman and John Young.  They were interested in John because he was the reader in the Little Fork Church, which had no minister, only visiting clergy.

Jacob Holtzclaw and his second wife Catherine sold 200 acres to John Young, Jr., and Katherine Young, infants, in 1748.  There was a reservation in the sale in that the land was for the use of the parents (John and Anna Maria) during their lives.  (The father seems to be called John Young, Elder.)  The father died before 1764, when the land was in the possession of Harman Young.

The six children of John and Anna Maria Young are:

• Mary Gertrude,
• Harman,
• Elizabeth,
• John, Jr.,
• Katherine, and, possibly,
• Samuel.

So far, three German villages or parishes have figured prominently in the Little Fork story.  Freudenberg sent the most people.  Seelbach is represented, as is Trupbach.  Seelbach and Trupbach are very close neighbors.  Today it is hard to tell where one ends and the other starts.  This last May, I asked Lars Bohn, a resident of Trupbach, about civic relations between Trupbach and Seelbach.  A frown came over his face and he admitted there was a rivalry.  Actually, they are both a part of Siegen now.  I have one photo which was taken from a hill overlooking both villages and each can be seen, though they merge where their respective valleys come together.
(05 Dec 02)

As a supplement to the previous note, I submit the following.  The genealogy of John Young was taken from B. C. Holtzclaw, �Ancestry and Descendants of the Nassau-Siegen Immigrants to Virginia 1714-1750", published by the Germanna Foundation.

John Young (Johannes Jung) arrived at Philadelphia on 23 Sept 1734, on the ship Hope, Daniel Reid, Master, from Rotterdam, last from Cowes.  This information comes from �A Collection of Upwards of Thirty Thousand Names of German, Swiss, Dutch, French Immigrants in Pennsylvania from 1727 to 1776, etc.�, by Prof. I. Daniel Rupp, reprinted by the Gen. Publ. Co. in Baltimore in 1965.  (It might be noted that two names away from Johannes Jung was Johannes N�h.  There were also a Richter, a Hoffman, a Fischbach, and an Otterbach.)  There was a Harmon Jung, under sixteen years of age.  No mention was made of the women, and it is an assumption that Anna Maria (wife) and Mary Gertrude and Elizabeth (daughters) were included.  As I have emphasized in some of the recent notes, these assumptions about the women and children may not be true.

The comments about the Moravian missionaries came from the �Virginia Magazine of History of Biography�, in a series of articles, starting in January 1904.  The transcribers and translators were Rev. William J. Hinke and Charles E. Kemper.  The original diaries were written in the decade of the 1740's in German, and are now stored in the Archives at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.  The work of Hinke and Kemper was used in an article in �Beyond Germanna� in Vol. 10, n.3 issue on page 564ff, for an article about the Moravian missionaries and what they said about the Germans in Virginia.

John Crim had a grant of land of 127.5 acres in the Little Fork next to Joseph Coons and John Young.  His origins in Germany are less than certain according to B.C. Holtzclaw, but his father seems to be Christian Grimm of Oberschelden.  His mother was Elisabeth Spielmann of Oberschelden.  Trupbach, Seelbach, and Oberschelden form a line of three villages of extent about two miles (with some hills between them).  John was christened 16 Jan 1701, making him 39 when he entered the Americas in 1740.  He had a younger brother by four years, Jacob, who is said to have come with him.  From their ages, the two men were probably married when they came but no marriages have been found in Germany.

John Crim probably even had a son when he came, as a John Crim served in the French and Indian War.  This would be a little old for the father, and for the son to be old enough it would mean he was probably born before 1735 in Germany.  John Crim sold his land in the Little Fork and moved to Fauquier County on the other side of the Rappahannock River, and settled on the Manor of Leeds as a tenant.  He died in Fauquier County in 1772.  His first wife was perhaps Gertrude, and the next wife was Catherine.  The tithable list shows five sons of John Crim:

• John,
• Jacob,
• Harman,
• Joseph, and
• Peter.

John (Jr.) Crim moved to Fayette Co., Kentucky, and is shown in the census of 1790, but not in the 1800 census of Clark Co., which was formed from Fayette and Bourbon Counties in 1792

Jacob Crim, son of John (Sr.), lived in Fauquier County and then moved to Culpeper County, where he appears in several deeds.

Harman Crim, son of John (Sr.), lived in Fauquier County all of his life until his death in 1807.

Joseph Crim, son of John (Sr.), lived in Fauquier until he moved to Kentucky, where he died in 1827.

Peter Crim, son of John (Sr.), moved to Kentucky, where it is said that he was killed by the Indians.

Returning to Jacob, the brother of John (Sr.), who came with John in 1740, less is known about his family.  He seems to have lived on John's land in the Little Fork until John sold the land.  Jacob then bought land in another section of Culpeper Co.  One son, Jacob Crim, Jr., is known.  Several deeds show him.  In a couple of the deeds, the land is identified as having been John Kilby's land at one time.

Whenever I hear or read the name Crim, I think of the brothers Grimm who wrote the fairy tales.  This book was so unpleasant to read that I abandoned it.  The name Grimm is sometimes rendered as Krimm or Crim showing the confusion between G, K, and C.
(07 Dec 02)

A member of the Cuntze family, Joseph, came in 1714.  If I understand B. C. Holtzclaw correctly, a nephew of this Joseph, who was another Joseph, came in 1737 and took up land in the Little Fork.  The younger Joseph was 25 and unmarried when he arrived.  He married an Elizabeth, surname uncertain.  In 1747 he had a grant of 127 acres in the Little Fork.  This land was given to Joseph Coons, Jr., in 1783 by Joseph, Sr., and Elizabeth.  Whether there was an earlier record in which Elizabeth appears is unknown to me.  Joseph, Sr., disappears from the records in 1793.

If you stand in Jeffersonton in Culpeper County, you are standing on the land of Joseph.  First, the land was deeded to a son, Joseph, and the town was laid out in 1798.  The Coons sold lots to others.

The tithables list shows five sons of Joseph, Sr.:

• Jacob,
• John,
• Henry,
• Joseph, and
• Frederick.

Joseph, son of Joseph, Sr., and Elizabeth, did not move to Kentucky.  He remained in Culpeper County until he died in 1819.  He married Catherine Hopper.

Jacob married Elizabeth Hanback (Heimbach).  He was born perhaps as early as 1740, for a daughter of his, Mary, is mentioned in a 1767 deed.

John died in Kentucky.  John, perhaps born about 1745, also married an Elizabeth, but her surname is not known.  John probably moved to Kentucky at the same as his brother, Jacob, that is, about 1793.

Henry, another son of Joseph, Sr., also moved to Kentucky, and again at about the same time as his brothers.  He married Mary Hanback, the sister of Elizabeth Hanback who married Jacob Coons.  His will, dated 1821 was not probated until 1823.

The youngest son, the fifth, of Joseph, Sr., and Elizabeth, was Frederick, who was not born until 1762.  He married Mary Ann Mathews.  He too moved to Kentucky, and appears in the census there.

One daughter is known, Anne Elizabeth, who married Joseph Wayman, son of George Wayman.

Five Coons appear in the Culpeper Classes in 1781:
(These are the five sons above.)

• Frederick,
• Henry,
• Lt. Jacob,
• John, and
• Joseph.

In the 1787 tax lists, the father and all five of the sons appear as independent persons.  In these records, two spellings are used, Coons and Coones.
(09 Dec 02)

Much of the land that we have been writing about came from the land patented and granted to Jacob Holtzclaw.  The first patent to a German in the Little Fork was issued to him (Jacob Hulsclaw), for 680 acres, dated 27 Sept 1729.  He had to pay nothing for this, as it was in Spotsylvania and fell under the "free land" clause in the legislation creating the county.  Probably this was a major motivation for him, even though it was across the Rappahannock River (called many things, including Hedgman's River) from Germantown.

The second German to obtain land in the Little Fork was John Fishbey who obtained a patent for 400 acres, on 28 Sept 1730.  John Fishback came with his father and mother in 1714.  On 4 June 1748, when the land had been declared to be in the Northern Neck, Frederick Fishback obtained a grant of 790 acres, which included the 400 acres that his father, John, had taken.  The county was now Orange.

Two days later, Jacob Holtzclaw obtained a grant of 1300 acres, which consisted of the original 680 acres above and the balance was a surplus.  This is the land where so many of the later immigrants were settled.  (Note the land is incorrectly described as in Prince William County, which was where he was living at the time.)

[The John Fishback above was the son of the immigrant Philip Fishback, who lived at Trupbach.  His house location in Trupbach is known and a photograph of the exterior and the interior is shown on the CD, "Germanna Villages, A Photographic Essay." The house now is subdivided into two apartments.  The lower apartment, which was originally the barn, has very low ceilings.  The Fischbach family is associated with Seelbach and Trupbach, two of the villages that have been mentioned here recently.]

The lands of Frederick Fishback were adjoined on the north by more lands of Henry Huffman.

Frederick Fishback (son of John, grandson of Philip) had another, smaller tract, of 185 acres, for which he obtained a grant on 12 Feb 1747 (NS).  It was located along the Hedgman River and straddled Negro Run.  No other Germans adjoined this property.

Earlier, we had Jacob Fishback who came in 1734.  His descendants lived in the Little Fork also and the story gets very confusing.

Henry Otterbach had a grant for 200 acres of land in the Little Fork on 10 Dec 1747.  (Now, would it be correct to say that was exactly 255 years ago?  I am writing this on 10 Dec 2002.  What is the effect of the calendar change?)

It seems highly probable that one of the 1714 immigrants was Harman Otterbach, who died within a few years at Germanna.  This Harman had a nephew and a great-nephew who came over in 1734.  Both of these men were named Henry.  The two men are distinguished in some cases by the county of their residence.  The father was Fauquier Henry and the son was Culpeper Henry.  The grant above was to Culpeper Henry, though at the time the land was in Orange, but within a couple of years it became Culpeper County.

The full name of Culpeper Henry was Johann Henrich Otterbach, and he was born at Trupbach in 1714.  He lived until 1799 when he was quite elderly.  He must have been filled with confidence for he did not write his will until 1797, when he was 83.  He left his property to his sons, John, Joseph, and Harman, and to his daughters, Mary Scott and Christian (Christina?) Wommack, who received one Shilling each.  To his daughters, Elizabeth and Ann Utterback, he also left one Shilling each.  To his daughters, Caty Utterback and Sarah Barnett, he left all the moveable estate, except the horses, which went to the sons, Jacob, Henry, and William.  The land went to the sons Jacob, Henry, and William.

Late in life, the father married a second time and had a second family.  B. C. Holtzclaw surmised that the heirs who received one Shilling were of the first family, and the others were of the second family.  Henry and William were underage when their father died at 85 years of age.  Little is known about the two wives.

Two of the sons, Harmon and Joseph, are listed in the Culpeper Classes, both in number 37.  The only other obvious Germans were Jacob Nay, Jr., and John Nay, who were near neighbors.

In the 1787 Personal Property Tax List for Culpeper County, the family members are listed as Utterbacks, not as Otterbacks.  First names are Harman, Henry, Jacob, Joseph, Martin, and Susanna.
(11 Dec 02)

As we have been studying the German families in the Little Fork, we must be impressed by the narrow geographic range in Germany from which they came.  After you mention Trupbach, Seelbach, and Freudenberg, you have just about covered the villages of their origins.  We have not emphasized it much, but in their ancestry many of the same names keep popping up again and again.

For this Note, we have another man who lived in Trupbach, Johannes Noeh (N�h).  He was born 4 Mar 1694 at Klafeld, with Johannes Heite of Seelbach as his godfather.  He married Maria Clara Otterbach of Trupbach in 1717.  The couple lived at Trupbach, where five children were born, four of whom (we presume) came to America with them in 1734 (the fifth died).  The birth records are taken from the Siegen church record, where the residents of Trupbach went to church.  John Nay, as he was usually called in Virginia, died before 1745.

Only one son seems to have survived.  (Two were born in Germany and one died in Germany).  The mother was born in 1692, so she was 42 years old when they came to America.  Little is known of the daughters of whom there should have been three that came to America, but proof of this is lacking.  Therefore, most of the Nay genealogy depends on the son (Johann) Jacob Noeh.

Jacob Nay had a grant of 146 acres adjacent to Otterbach, Button, Dewit, and Harris, on 11 May 1752.  This was an early grant in Culpeper County, which was a "young" county.  He was twenty years old on this date.  As an older citizen, he appears to have moved to Fauquier County.  B. C. Holtzclaw seems to have identified eight sons and one daughter that he had.  Two sons, John and Jacob, Jr., are in the 37th Culpeper Class, along with two Utterbacks who were on the neighboring farm.

In the 1787 Culpeper Personal Property Tax List, there seems to be only John Nay who had only one horse and one cow to declare.

Jacob Nay was the northernmost German on the Prof. Hackley map.  There were at least two more Germans to the north of these though.  First, was John Button and, second, was Tillman Weaver.  A third possibility is James Spilman, who abutted Weaver.  Whether this Spilman was a German or not is unknown to me at this time.
(12 Dec 02)

If you are following the patents on the map on my web page, you will see that we have been moving to the north.  We are now at the Weaver patent, or, more exactly, the Weaver grant for 400 acres recorded in Book G, page 491 of the Northern Neck grants.  The man was Tilman Weaver.

The immigrant family is believed to be the father, Johann Henrich Weber, the mother, Anna Margarethe Huttmann, a son, Johannes, a daughter, Cathrin, and a son, Tillman.  There are no records for the father Johann, the son Johannes, or the daughter Cathrin.  The last record for the mother is in 1724, when she and Tilman made application for head rights in their names only.  Had the other three members of the family arrived in Virginia, head rights for them could have been claimed.  The only requirement to earn a head right was to be alive when you landed.  The lack of any claim for the other three members of the family suggests they did not arrive.

Incidentally, B. C. Holtzclaw counted five members of the Weber family in his count of 42 people, but the head right application suggests that he should not have counted five, but only two.  (Comments on this are invited.)

The Webers/Weavers were from Eiserfeld, which is just down the valley toward Siegen from Eisern, from where several other individuals came.  The church in Roedgen is mentioned as the place where some of the marriage and baptism records are recorded.  This church sits on a ridge of land above the valley.

Tilman Weaver's land grant was adjacent to many English people.  On the west side was one of the land holdings of the Rev. Thompson, who built Salubria for his bride, the widow Spotswood.  On the east side of Weaver was Picket and Reynolds.  On the southeast, Capt. Green had a patent.  On the south side is Button, and on the southwest corner is Harris.  On the north side is James Spilman, whom I am not sure about (comments invited).

All of the descendants in the Weaver family are through Tilman Weaver, who was only fourteen when he came.  By the time Spotswood put the men to work quarrying and mining in March of 1716, it would appear that Tilman was about 16, old enough to be one of the men.

Since the Weavers continued to live at Germantown until the 1900's, Tilman perhaps never lived on his grant in the Little Fork.  No descendant appears to be in the Culpeper Classes of 1781.  All of the Weavers in the 1787 Culpeper personal property tax list appear to be from the Second Colony.
(14 Dec 02)

The Little Fork Henry Huffman married, 4 June 1734, Anna Margarete Huettenhen, who was born at Seelbach in 1713.  In the 1960 notes on the Little Fork Colony by B. C. Holtzclaw, he said that Little Fork Henry had married Margaret Harnsberger.  Later in his "Ancestry and Descendants of the Nassau-Siegen Immigrants", he admitted this was a mistake.  Margaret Harnsberger married Henry Huffman, the oldest son of the Eisern Henry Huffman who came in 1743.  When you talk about the Henry Huffmans, you must be careful.  Sooner or later, everyone gets tripped up.

Henry Huffman was the estate administrator for a John Huffman, who turned out to be a cousin of Little Fork Henry, not a brother or a father.  Another mistake that B. C. Holtzclaw found was that Catherine Huffman, the daughter of Little Fork Henry, probably never married.  It had been said that she married Col. John Ashby of Fauquier County.

The key to unraveling some of this was the church records in Germany.

Harman Miller was the son of John Frederick Miller and his wife Anna Maria Arnd who came in 1738 from Freudenberg.  Not only is a name like Miller an easy one to get confused, the John Frederick Miller family had sons named Harman and Haman.  Harman married Mary Hutcherson, which is proven by a power of attorney given by Harman and Mary to deal with their interest in the estate of Daniel Hutcherson, dec'd, "our father, late of Stokes Co., NC. . ."  This was in 1807.  This information comes from Clovis E. Miller, who wrote about Harman Miller in the volume 11, number 4 issue of Beyond Germanna.

Henry Utterback is generally considered now to be a later comer who was not born in Virginia.

There is a lesson in all of this.  Never be content to rest, but keep searching for evidence.  Though Prof. Holtzclaw thought he had evidence in 1960, he later admitted that some of the conclusions were not correct.  We should all show some humility.  As I said in my talk at the Germanna Seminar last July, probabilities have to be attached to everything.  Some things are guesses with probability of being true of 0.05 (1 in 20 chance).  Very few things are certain or have a probability of 1.0.  Most of the things that we believe are true are less than 1.0 (i.e., a certainty).
(18 Dec 02)

Who is celebrating birthday number One Hundred?  He is actually well known.  It is Mr. Theodore Bear, usually called by his nickname, Teddy.  His mother was Appolonia Margarete Steiff, a most remarkable woman, who was born in 1847, in Germany.  When she was 18 months old, she contracted polio, which left her without the use of her legs, and only partial control of her right arm.  In her family, the female members earned a living as seamstresses.  Margarete's partial paralysis did not deter her from learning the trade of a seamstress; it only took her a little longer.  Margarete and her older sisters were so successful that their father enlarged the family home to add a workshop.  Eventually the sisters left home, but Margarete continued and added a felt shop when she was 30.  This required the opening of a small factory.

Always on the lookout for ideas, Margarete produced some elephant pincushions to give away to friends as Christmas presents.  The elephants, though, made the biggest hit with the children, not with the mothers.  The factory expanded into "Felt Things and Toy Factory".  Each year there were new additions until, by 1893, the company was listed in the commercial register and appeared at the trade shows showing their wares.  Soon there were thirty different animals, such as monkeys, donkeys, horses, dromedaries, pigs, cats, dogs, mice, rabbits, and giraffes (but no bears).  Some of the animals were mounted on wheels and this version was a popular line.

As the enterprise grew, Margarete enlisted the aid of family members, in particular, her nephew, Richard, who was close to his aunt.  He was an artist who enjoyed watching the bears in the zoo.  He made sketches of them.  He proposed an idea to Margarete.  Let's do a bear but let's add some new features.  The head should be able to turn and the arms and legs should be moveable.  The covering was to be mohair and it was to have glass eyes.

Margarete was not impressed.  She thought a bear would frighten children, it would be costly to produce, and it was too risky.  Richard persisted and got Margarete's approval for Petsy¹ (an old-fashioned name for bears used in fairy tales).  Officially the bear was 55 PB².  The 55 was the bear's height in centimeters (about 22 inches), P stood for plush, and B for moveable.  Richard took a consignment of 55 PB to the Leipzig Toy Trade Fair in 1902 to test the market.  The result was what his aunt had predicted.  No one was interested.  It appears that one 55 PB went to America.

Unconnected with the appearance of 55 PB, Teddy Roosevelt was involved in an episode with a bear cub which drew favorable publicity.  This is believed to be the origin of the name Teddy bear³.  The idea of a Teddy bear caught on on both sides of the Atlantic with both the public and manufacturers.  Richard brought out an improved model, the 35 PB of 1905, and even his aunt loved this.  To show the product was genuine, in 1904 it became the practice for the Steiff factory to sew a button in the ear.  In 1908, the Steiff factory officially adopted the name "Teddy Bear".  By 1907, three thousand Teddy bears were leaving the factory every day, or almost a million in the year.  At one time, 1800 people worked in Margarete Steiff's factories.  She died in 1909, after having issued more than five hundred different models of soft toy animals.  Apparently she did not know what the words, "mobility challenged", meant. (From an article by Sue Grant in "Austrian, Swiss & German Life.")
(19 Dec 02)