Today I thought we might revisit the reasons that our Germanna ancestors came. The answers are complex. And how do you read the minds of people who lived almost three hundred years ago?
One of the best treatments in book form is " Early Eighteenth Century Palatine Emigration ", by Walter Allen Knittle. The book has been reprinted by Genealogical Publishing Company and is available in many libraries. Don't let the title mislead you; the comments apply to all areas of Germany.
After one reads and studies the question of why did they come, the first comment is usually, "Why didn't they leave sooner?", and not, "Why did they come?".
Germany, in the first half of the sixteen hundreds, was a land torn by war, the Thirty Years War, which lasted from 1618 to 1648. All countries of Europe were involved in that they sent armies, but Germany was the battlefield. And Germany suffered most of the losses. It is said that areas or regions of Germany were reduced to one-third of their previous populations. Disease was the major reason, but this arose from several causes -- lack of food, crowded living conditions as civilian moved ahead of the armies, and the level of movement which spread the diseases.
Late in the sixteen hundreds, and in the early seventeen hundreds, the armies of France ranged over the Palatinate and Baden. Though the area of battle was more restricted than for the Thirty Years War, the intensity of the war was bad. The town of Heidelberg was burned to the ground, with only a handful of buildings left standing. (One of the effects of these campaigns was the destruction of the church books, and of gaps of information in the books.)
So "Germany" was not a very peaceful place to live, and a person might well have wished that he were somewhere else.
As a consequence of war, there were many migrations of people. Sometimes people moved to get out of the way of the armies. More importantly, after the war, there was vast, underpopulated regions, with vacant farms and vacant houses and barns. The rulers of these regions sent out "invitations" for people to settle there, emphasizing the favorable conditions that could be had if one moved into their Principality. Vast numbers of people did move, across the Germanic regions, and from one country to another. Many Swiss Anabaptists moved into Baden and Württemberg (also to Alsace and the Palatinate). Some people moved from the eastern regions, such as Austria, to the lands along the Rhine. One of the Germanna families who moved from Austria to Germany was the Blankenbakers (the move may have been motivated by religion as much as anything, since Austria became a Catholic country after the Thirty Years War). All of this movement had an important repercussion in that families were, perhaps unknowingly, being trained to relocate as a means of settling problems.
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.