As evidence of the influence, in 1717, one of the emigrants that year was Abraham Merckle, the father of Jost Hite's wife.

Since the villages of many of the 1717 emigrants have been learned since I did this research, a new search would probably find more.  All of the villages above are in the midst of the homes of many of the Second Colony emigrants.  I did no research in the region that was specifically known as the Palatinate (the home of the Palatines).  A few of the Second Colony people did come from the Palatinate.

The word Palatine has two meanings.  English people used it to mean all Germans.  This practice started at the time of the 1709 emigration, when so many of the Germans came from the Palatinate.  In writing about Virginia, the Rev. Hugh Jones in his book (printed 1724) referred to the Second Colony as " Germans or Palatines ".  In this sense it was interchangeable with the word, German .  More specifically, the Palatinate was only one region in the land which was to eventually become Germany.  Unfortunately, it did not always refer to exactly the same area, as the Palatinate grew or shrank, phenomena typical of many of the regions in Germany.  As an example of how principalities did change, Baden is noted as having extremes of area from a thousand square miles to more than ten thousand square miles.

This confusion over where the boundary lines ran is even worse than the problem we have with counties here in America.  In order to provide a stable reference point for filing information, I believe it was decided to use the boundaries as of 1872 (I may be in error a few years) as reference marks.  Thus I could say that my Blankenbaker ancestors emigrated from Baden (now a part of Baden-Württemberg); however, at the time they left, they said they were from the lands belonging to the Bishops of Speyer, who were Catholic.  Early in the nineteenth century these lands were ceded to the civil authorities and today we refer to Baden.