This is a story of a German family history in America. Some of it is certain, some of it is very likely, and some of it is just speculation. On the right are individual pages that discuss much of what's below in more detail. I hope you enjoy this site, and don't forget to subscribe for email updates!
The earliest parts of this story are known to be true, but there is almost no proof that these early immigrants to New York were our ancestors. As the story unfolds I will explain why I linked the speculative pieces to our known family history.
Our story in America may begin with Jacob (or Johann?) German, his wife Maria, and their young son Hans Georg. Jacob was born c.1680 in Merishausen, Switzerland, the son of Georg German, a bricklayer.
Jacob, Maria and Hans German were Palatine immigrants to New York in 1710. The Palatine emigration story to America is a dramatic one; you can learn more about it on my DNA Results/Speculation page and the links there; I especially recommend this Wikipedia article.
The Palatine Germans who were transported to New York in 1710 were desperately poor, and many died during the journey. However, we know that Jacob, Maria and Hans survived. They were put to work in West Camp, NY as indentured servants in a plan to manufacture stores (primarily pine tar) for the British Navy; this enterprise ultimately failed. Governor Hunter released them from servitude on September 11, 1712 after informing them they would receive no more support from him. With winter ahead and no provision made for it, the Palatines dispersed into the New York frontier, into the valleys of the Mohawk, Schoharie, and other central NY rivers in an attempt to find suitable farmland and to survive.
More interesting reading: Early 18th Century Palatine Emigration. See also my Prattsville Colonial History page.
Perhaps Jacob, Maria and Hans were among those earliest immigrants to the valley of the Schoharie, we simply do not know. After leaving West Camp, they drop from historical sight. What we do know is that when our proven ancestors reappear in the record in the early 1800's, they do so in Schoharie Kill...now renamed Prattsville. But to confuse the trail, our earliest proven ancestor, Isaac F German, was known as "Germond" by his Huested in-laws in Dutchess County, New York.
There is one indication that Jacob may have been our ancestor, courtesy of a modern-day German who lives in North Carolina. Our Y-DNA matches exactly, which means that he and I have a "German" ancestor in common. His family has been in North Carolina since the late 1700's, and their oral tradition is that they came out of New York and are descended from early-1700's immigrants from Germany.
For sixty years the European settlers of the Schoharie valley built their farms and industries, living in relative obscurity on the edge of the frontier, until the Revolutionary War. The local Native American tribes allied with the British, and under the command of a British officer set about attacking their towns and farms. The pioneer settlers finally left the Schoharie valley and returned east, to the safety of lands more firmly under the control of the patriots.
When the war finally ended, the 19th century histories say that these pioneers returned to Schoharie Kill to resume their lives.
Now we can move to much firmer ground.
About 1782, in Dutchess County, NY, Isaac F German was born. We do not know who his parents were. Probably two generations had passed between Hans German (born c. 1707) and the birth of his possible great-grandson, Isaac F.
When next we spot Isaac F German, it's in the valley of the Schoharie Kill, Greene County, NY in the early 1800's. That's almost certainly Isaac in the 1810 and 1820 censuses, married to Rachel and with an increasing number of children; that's probably also him in the 1830 census. By the 1830's Isaac is buying and selling land in Greene and Delaware County (just across Schoharie creek), and engaging in land transactions with Zadock Pratt, for whom the village of Schoharie Kill would be renamed Prattsville, in 1833.
Isaac and Rachel's oldest son, born c.1806, was Zachariah German. Ezekiel (b.c.1810), Abel (b.1815), Alfred, Rachel (b.1818), Gitty (Gertrude,b.c.1823) and Martin (b.c.1827) were additional children who lived to adulthood.
In 1832, Isaac's wife Rachel died and was buried in the lower Prattsville cemetery...and in the same year his daughter, Rachel, only 14 years old, was married to a neighbor, Edward Soule. In 1833 or 1834, Isaac married Jane, surname unknown, and began another family, which appears in the censuses of 1840 and 1850.
Isaac and Rachel's third son, Abel, died on May 31, 1844, less than two months after marrying a neighbor, Delanah Nichol. Abel was buried in the same cemetery several rows east of where his mother had been buried 12 years earlier.
From at least 1834, continuing into the 1850's, Isaac and his sons and their families lived and worked on the north slope of Vega mountain in Delaware County, less than 5 miles across the Schoharie river from Prattsville. Undoubtedly they farmed, and stripped the hemlock trees of bark for Zadock Pratt's great leather tanneries, and gradually cleared the mountains of the trees for lumber and for potash. By the late 1840's the hemlock trees were gone, the tanneries were closing, and the first boom times of the Schoharie Valley were coming to an end.
Was Pratt German named in admiration of Zadock Pratt? The German clan was doing business with Colonel Pratt, as was everyone else around Prattsville, and everyone seems to have admired Zadock greatly.
We know, from reports of the Prattsville Advocate, that 1854 was a year of terrible drought, which reduced agricultural output in the area by over 50% compared to the year before.
In February, 1855, Zachariah and his wife, Mary (Polly) Chamberlain, sold their land on the side of Vega mountain. Polly moved into Prattsville to live with their daughter, Mary Jane Howard, and her husband Willson. Zachariah and his sons (Samuel, Pratt, and Abel) headed off to the new frontier of Illinois, to Ogle County, where they once again leave proof they passed that way in the county's deed records in Oregon, Illinois.
In 1864, Isaac, now over 80 years old, and his second wife Jane bought a home in Prattsville, just four doors south of Polly's home on Washington Street. Sometime in the 1860's, Isaac's son Ezekiel and his wife Betsey sold their land on Vega mountain and moved to Ostego, NY, then later to Jackson, Pennsylvania. Isaac died in 1866, and Jane probably died in 1873. Our German ancestors were finally drifting away from the lands where they (perhaps!) had now lived for nearly 150 years.
Meanwhile, back in Illinois....in 1857, Zachariah sold his land in Ogle county to his sons, Samuel and Pratt, acting as trustees for Polly German. We don't know when Zachariah and Polly were divorced, but by 1860 Zachariah was working as a farmhand outside Vienna, Maries County, Missouri and sometime later married Sarah Snodgrass Meyers, of Vienna. There they lived on a farm until his death in 1880, and hers in 1883, and there they are probably buried, in the Hutchison/Elrod/Union Hill cemetery outside of town.
All three of Zachariah's boys, Samuel, Pratt and Abel, enlisted with the Union for the Civil War. Samuel was wounded and discharged in 1863; Abel was in cavalry with Sherman on his march to the sea, and wounded or ill when he was discharged at the war's end in 1865. But not all of the Prattsville German boys escaped the war alive: in 1863 Isaac's youngest son with Jane, his second wife, accepted a bounty to substitute for a New Hampshire man who had been drafted. James German was captured by the Confederates on May 16, 1864 at Drewry's Bluff, Virginia, and "died of disease" on June 1 in Petersburg.
After the war Zachariah's boys drifted west, across Iowa and into southeast Nebraska, where Samuel settled down, very successfully, to farming. Samuel is buried in Richardson County, Nebraska. Pratt had a growing family in Ogle County, Illinois in the 1860 and 1865 census, but they seem to have disappeared by 1870...a mystery still to be resolved. At some point after 1879 Samuel had a falling out with his brother Abel; as a result he changed his name to Germain and all his descendants now carry that name, rather than German.
In July 1874, Polly's home in Prattsville was nearly destroyed by a flood, and in August Polly wrote to Samuel about coming out to live with him (his first wife having recently died), with her granddaughters Hattie and Mary Etta (by her daughter Mary Jane, who died in Prattsville on September 12, 1871.) We don't know precisely when Polly and the girls moved to Nebraska, but she died in Athens, Nebraska on February 11, 1878, aged 77 years.
In August/September 2011, just days before we arrived to pursue more research into the Germans of Prattsville, the town was almost totally destroyed by yet another flood. When we drove through in 2012, many of the houses had been condemned and were to be torn down. I wonder what happened to Polly and Jane's houses.
Abel German, my great-great-grandfather, continued on to north-central Kansas, with his wife Sabina, where in 1874 he took on a quit-claim homestead outside of Glen Elder and began to build his own future as a farmer. He died there, in 1904.
Abel's son Chesman, grandson Kenneth (b. 1909, d. 1999), and great-grandson Richard (my father, b. 1932) were all born on the family farm south of Glen Elder, Kansas. Their families and descendants extend one branch of the German saga in America into the 21st century. But there are many other branches of Abel's family as well.
My cousin, Gay Whited, has a marvelous website with her family's history, and many old photos and stories. She is also building this site, with lots of photos and information about Abel and Sabina German and their descendants in Mitchell County, Kansas. Gay is descended from Abel German's son Edward, while I'm descended from Chesman. They and their descendants farmed the land originally homesteaded by Abel and John Johnson, until the early 1960's when their land was acquired by eminent domain to create Waconda Lake.
Male line descendants of Isaac F German's sons from his second marriage, to Jane, and descendants of Ezekiel and Betsey's sons, may still live in the Delaware/Greene/Lexington County area of New York...and perhaps descendants of Isaac's ancestors still live in Dutchess County. If you happen to read this story, if the surname German is in your ancestry and your family history is from colonial New York in or near the Catskills, please write to me about what you know of your family. Working together, we just may be able to replace the speculation that begins this story with facts about the earliest Germans in America.
And finally...there are, today, several families with the surname German living in Merishausen, Switzerland. Someday I hope to see if we also share the same DNA. Isn't it incredible, to track our families across the centuries and the oceans with a simple skin scraping? To prove, or disprove, with certainty, kinship to people who lived so long ago?
I'd like to thank my aunt and uncle, Kenley and Lela Don German, for all the family research they did back when it was so much more difficult than now, preserved and passed on to us, and for introducing us to the fascinating detective work that makes genealogy so much fun.
This website is dedicated to the memory of Lela Don German, who passed away on December 1, 2015, and to Kenley German who passed away on February 18, 2021. They are greatly missed.
Douglas German
last updated February 21, 2021
douglaskgerman@gmail.com
More interesting reading: Early 18th Century Palatine Emigration. See also my Prattsville Colonial History page.
Perhaps Jacob, Maria and Hans were among those earliest immigrants to the valley of the Schoharie, we simply do not know. After leaving West Camp, they drop from historical sight. What we do know is that when our proven ancestors reappear in the record in the early 1800's, they do so in Schoharie Kill...now renamed Prattsville. But to confuse the trail, our earliest proven ancestor, Isaac F German, was known as "Germond" by his Huested in-laws in Dutchess County, New York.
There is one indication that Jacob may have been our ancestor, courtesy of a modern-day German who lives in North Carolina. Our Y-DNA matches exactly, which means that he and I have a "German" ancestor in common. His family has been in North Carolina since the late 1700's, and their oral tradition is that they came out of New York and are descended from early-1700's immigrants from Germany.
For sixty years the European settlers of the Schoharie valley built their farms and industries, living in relative obscurity on the edge of the frontier, until the Revolutionary War. The local Native American tribes allied with the British, and under the command of a British officer set about attacking their towns and farms. The pioneer settlers finally left the Schoharie valley and returned east, to the safety of lands more firmly under the control of the patriots.
When the war finally ended, the 19th century histories say that these pioneers returned to Schoharie Kill to resume their lives.
Now we can move to much firmer ground.
About 1782, in Dutchess County, NY, Isaac F German was born. We do not know who his parents were. Probably two generations had passed between Hans German (born c. 1707) and the birth of his possible great-grandson, Isaac F.
When next we spot Isaac F German, it's in the valley of the Schoharie Kill, Greene County, NY in the early 1800's. That's almost certainly Isaac in the 1810 and 1820 censuses, married to Rachel and with an increasing number of children; that's probably also him in the 1830 census. By the 1830's Isaac is buying and selling land in Greene and Delaware County (just across Schoharie creek), and engaging in land transactions with Zadock Pratt, for whom the village of Schoharie Kill would be renamed Prattsville, in 1833.
Isaac and Rachel's oldest son, born c.1806, was Zachariah German. Ezekiel (b.c.1810), Abel (b.1815), Alfred, Rachel (b.1818), Gitty (Gertrude,b.c.1823) and Martin (b.c.1827) were additional children who lived to adulthood.
In 1832, Isaac's wife Rachel died and was buried in the lower Prattsville cemetery...and in the same year his daughter, Rachel, only 14 years old, was married to a neighbor, Edward Soule. In 1833 or 1834, Isaac married Jane, surname unknown, and began another family, which appears in the censuses of 1840 and 1850.
Isaac and Rachel's third son, Abel, died on May 31, 1844, less than two months after marrying a neighbor, Delanah Nichol. Abel was buried in the same cemetery several rows east of where his mother had been buried 12 years earlier.
From at least 1834, continuing into the 1850's, Isaac and his sons and their families lived and worked on the north slope of Vega mountain in Delaware County, less than 5 miles across the Schoharie river from Prattsville. Undoubtedly they farmed, and stripped the hemlock trees of bark for Zadock Pratt's great leather tanneries, and gradually cleared the mountains of the trees for lumber and for potash. By the late 1840's the hemlock trees were gone, the tanneries were closing, and the first boom times of the Schoharie Valley were coming to an end.
Was Pratt German named in admiration of Zadock Pratt? The German clan was doing business with Colonel Pratt, as was everyone else around Prattsville, and everyone seems to have admired Zadock greatly.
We know, from reports of the Prattsville Advocate, that 1854 was a year of terrible drought, which reduced agricultural output in the area by over 50% compared to the year before.
In February, 1855, Zachariah and his wife, Mary (Polly) Chamberlain, sold their land on the side of Vega mountain. Polly moved into Prattsville to live with their daughter, Mary Jane Howard, and her husband Willson. Zachariah and his sons (Samuel, Pratt, and Abel) headed off to the new frontier of Illinois, to Ogle County, where they once again leave proof they passed that way in the county's deed records in Oregon, Illinois.
In 1864, Isaac, now over 80 years old, and his second wife Jane bought a home in Prattsville, just four doors south of Polly's home on Washington Street. Sometime in the 1860's, Isaac's son Ezekiel and his wife Betsey sold their land on Vega mountain and moved to Ostego, NY, then later to Jackson, Pennsylvania. Isaac died in 1866, and Jane probably died in 1873. Our German ancestors were finally drifting away from the lands where they (perhaps!) had now lived for nearly 150 years.
Meanwhile, back in Illinois....in 1857, Zachariah sold his land in Ogle county to his sons, Samuel and Pratt, acting as trustees for Polly German. We don't know when Zachariah and Polly were divorced, but by 1860 Zachariah was working as a farmhand outside Vienna, Maries County, Missouri and sometime later married Sarah Snodgrass Meyers, of Vienna. There they lived on a farm until his death in 1880, and hers in 1883, and there they are probably buried, in the Hutchison/Elrod/Union Hill cemetery outside of town.
All three of Zachariah's boys, Samuel, Pratt and Abel, enlisted with the Union for the Civil War. Samuel was wounded and discharged in 1863; Abel was in cavalry with Sherman on his march to the sea, and wounded or ill when he was discharged at the war's end in 1865. But not all of the Prattsville German boys escaped the war alive: in 1863 Isaac's youngest son with Jane, his second wife, accepted a bounty to substitute for a New Hampshire man who had been drafted. James German was captured by the Confederates on May 16, 1864 at Drewry's Bluff, Virginia, and "died of disease" on June 1 in Petersburg.
After the war Zachariah's boys drifted west, across Iowa and into southeast Nebraska, where Samuel settled down, very successfully, to farming. Samuel is buried in Richardson County, Nebraska. Pratt had a growing family in Ogle County, Illinois in the 1860 and 1865 census, but they seem to have disappeared by 1870...a mystery still to be resolved. At some point after 1879 Samuel had a falling out with his brother Abel; as a result he changed his name to Germain and all his descendants now carry that name, rather than German.
In July 1874, Polly's home in Prattsville was nearly destroyed by a flood, and in August Polly wrote to Samuel about coming out to live with him (his first wife having recently died), with her granddaughters Hattie and Mary Etta (by her daughter Mary Jane, who died in Prattsville on September 12, 1871.) We don't know precisely when Polly and the girls moved to Nebraska, but she died in Athens, Nebraska on February 11, 1878, aged 77 years.
In August/September 2011, just days before we arrived to pursue more research into the Germans of Prattsville, the town was almost totally destroyed by yet another flood. When we drove through in 2012, many of the houses had been condemned and were to be torn down. I wonder what happened to Polly and Jane's houses.
Abel German, my great-great-grandfather, continued on to north-central Kansas, with his wife Sabina, where in 1874 he took on a quit-claim homestead outside of Glen Elder and began to build his own future as a farmer. He died there, in 1904.
Abel's son Chesman, grandson Kenneth (b. 1909, d. 1999), and great-grandson Richard (my father, b. 1932) were all born on the family farm south of Glen Elder, Kansas. Their families and descendants extend one branch of the German saga in America into the 21st century. But there are many other branches of Abel's family as well.
My cousin, Gay Whited, has a marvelous website with her family's history, and many old photos and stories. She is also building this site, with lots of photos and information about Abel and Sabina German and their descendants in Mitchell County, Kansas. Gay is descended from Abel German's son Edward, while I'm descended from Chesman. They and their descendants farmed the land originally homesteaded by Abel and John Johnson, until the early 1960's when their land was acquired by eminent domain to create Waconda Lake.
Male line descendants of Isaac F German's sons from his second marriage, to Jane, and descendants of Ezekiel and Betsey's sons, may still live in the Delaware/Greene/Lexington County area of New York...and perhaps descendants of Isaac's ancestors still live in Dutchess County. If you happen to read this story, if the surname German is in your ancestry and your family history is from colonial New York in or near the Catskills, please write to me about what you know of your family. Working together, we just may be able to replace the speculation that begins this story with facts about the earliest Germans in America.
And finally...there are, today, several families with the surname German living in Merishausen, Switzerland. Someday I hope to see if we also share the same DNA. Isn't it incredible, to track our families across the centuries and the oceans with a simple skin scraping? To prove, or disprove, with certainty, kinship to people who lived so long ago?
I'd like to thank my aunt and uncle, Kenley and Lela Don German, for all the family research they did back when it was so much more difficult than now, preserved and passed on to us, and for introducing us to the fascinating detective work that makes genealogy so much fun.
This website is dedicated to the memory of Lela Don German, who passed away on December 1, 2015, and to Kenley German who passed away on February 18, 2021. They are greatly missed.
Douglas German
last updated February 21, 2021
douglaskgerman@gmail.com
