Ancestry Magazine

Dig up almost any tree in America and odds are good that you’ll find at least one German root.

Scratch an American pedigree and you probably will find some German branches. That’s because it is estimated that more than one-half of us have at least some ancestors of Germanic origins.

Germans started coming to America as early as the seventeenth century, often under Dutch auspices, but the earliest specifically German settlement began in 1683 when thirteen Mennonite and Quaker families from Krefeld (a city of west-central Germany on the Rhine River) helped found Germantown, Pennsylvania.

These first German-Americans were called Palatines, a term for natives of the Palatinate, an area of southwest Germany from which so many of them came. Today, millions of descendants of these original Germantown settlers and other colonial immigrants from German-speaking lands of central Europe have what is popularly called Pennsylvania Dutch roots—where Dutch is actually an American term stemming from Deutsch, German for “German.”

Mostly these Pennsylvania Dutch were Lutheran or Reformed church members, but some of them were Amish, Anabaptists, Moravian Brethren, or Mennonites. Many of them actually spent only a few years in Pennsylvania, sometimes just long enough to work off their indentures before they removed to other locales.

Touching Up German Roots
Along the way of assimilation in America, our ancestors often fool us by blending or marrying into other ethnic groups. By the time we find them in popular sources, their names belie their Germanic origins, so much so that we may never realize they were once part of the Pennsylvania Dutch.

Typically, the journeys of our Colonial German ancestors to Pennsylvania began with a trip lasting four to six weeks that took immigrants down the Rhine to Rotterdam or Amsterdam. Over the course of the journey, the ships were examined at twenty-six customs houses—all at the convenience of the customs house officials. During the process, ships were detained, and the immigrant passengers spent a considerable amount of money.

When the boats finally reached their destinations, passengers were detained for another five to six weeks, again forcing the immigrants to spend money, usually most of what they had left. Ships then sailed to an English port, where there was another one- to two-week delay. Once en route to America, depending on the winds, the remainder of the trip could last seven to twelve more weeks.

The actual ocean voyage saw passengers packed densely into ships and without proper provisions including food and water. The conditions were ideal for disease, particularly dysentery, scurvy, typhoid, and smallpox.

Upon arrival, German immigrants were met with skepticism—eighteenth-century Pennsylvania authorities were said to have feared the large number of non-British arrivals. The authorities therefore devised a two-fold remedy for their fears:

• The captains of ships importing non-British immigrants were ordered to submit lists of all the people they imported.
• Male passengers age sixteen and older were ordered to sign the oath of allegiance to the English king.

This action resulted in preserving for today’s family historian tens of thousands of names of our German ancestors. More than 320 ships arrived in the port of Philadelphia between 1727 and 1775, and each carried in excess of three hundred immigrants. Most of these arrivals were led to the city hall to render their oath of allegiance to the king of Great Britain. Records pertaining to these processes can be found in the Pennsylvania German Pioneers, 1727—1808 database at Ance
stry.com.

Immigrants who still had some money left to pay their passages, or those with well-to-do friends or family who could pay their passage for them, were released. For the rest of the group, announcements were printed in newspapers stating how many new arrivals were to be sold.

Ultimately, the ships became market places with buyers making their choice among arriving immigrants and bargaining with them to work for a certain number of years and days. Buyers took the immigrants to the merchants and paid the immigrant’s passage and other debts. In return, the buyers also received from government authorities a written document that made the newcomers their property for a specific length of time.

Games of Hide-and-Seek
In spite of the difficulties and hardships colonial-period German immigrants faced in getting to America, plus a few years indentured servitude, many of our German ancestors still went on to became landowners, successful farmers, and craftsmen. But over the course of time, our Zimmermans (carpenter) may have turned into Carpenters and our Schneiders (tailor) into Synders and our Töpfers (potter) into Teppers. Other surnames may have mesh-ed into the great American melting pot so deeply and cleverly that it’s not uncommon for someone today to be completely unaware of his or her own Germanic ancestors.

We can easily overlook our Germans, especially those camouflaged under British names in the records. For example, among the names on the Allen’s passenger lists—a ship that arrived in Philadelphia in 1729—is Johannes McInterfeer. Now what is a Scotsman doing on a ship full of Palatines? Turns out he, too, was German, but his surname was spelled phonetically by the ship’s clerk. McInterfeer was really Meckendörfer.

While surnames may have been Anglicized, given names, however, including some of the following, may still point to a German heritage:

Males: Conrad, Casper/ Gasper,
Leonard/ Leonhard/ Linhart, Matheis/ Mathias, Georg, Paul/ Powell, Valentine (Feltin/Felty/Felte), Martin, Lorenz/ Lorentiz, Heinrich (Henry), Christian, Andrew. Also Jacob, Johann, Peter, and Adam.

Females: Elizabeth, Maria, Anna, Catherine, Margaret. Also Barbara, Eve, Magdalena (Lena), Ursula/ Ursella, Veronica, Susannah, and Johanna.

While none of these given names is a guarantee of Germanic roots, such names may be clues of an elusive German origin. And, as family historians, our challenge is to find these Germanic ancestors even when they’re hidden—whether under Anglicized names, on ships passenger lists, or elsewhere.