What is the most distant relative that you have met and known as a relative? In my case, Mary F. Mickey, who lives just up the road from me a piece, is an eighth cousin. Our common ancestor never left Germany. Each of us descend from a different son of this common ancestor. You could be descendant of Charlemagne (picking a person whose descendants are better known) along a path which is different from someone else. Then you could be umpty-umpth cousins, such as thirty-third cousins just to pick a figure that is not unreasonable.
Mary Mickey, as a young child here in the colonies, learned to read and write the old German script using a German textbook as a guide. This has put her in a good position to research the German records. She has done more for research on the Willheit family than anyone else. The Willheit family had not moved since the earliest church records were kept in Schwaigern. This allowed her to reconstruct the family in an amazing amount of detail.
The earliest Willheit she found was Georg Willert/Willheit who was a member of the Lutheran Church of St. Anne and St. John the Baptizer in Schwaigern. Using baptismal, marriage, and burial records she had reconstructed ten generations from Georg.
In the fifth generation, two men were born who would come to America. One of these was Johann Michael Willheit , who was an early Germanna settler along with his wife, Anna Maria Hengsteler, and two children, Tobias and Johann (John). His descendants are known primarily as Wilhoit or Willhite though there are variations of these basic forms. (Since Johann Michael's baptismal name was Willheit, I avoid showing any favoritism toward one spelling or another by using "Willheit".) In Schwaigern, there was another son but his fate is unknown. In Virginia, four more children were born, Eva, Adam, Matthias, and Phillip.
Johann Michael had a first cousin Johann Friederich Willheit , who arrived in Philadelphia in 1731, several years after Johann Michael, with his wife and four children. He settled in York County, Pennsylvania. His descendants are known primarily as Wilhide or Willhide, although some use Wilhite. Some of these children moved to Maryland. Though the two cousins were not all that far apart physically, there is no evidence that they ever met in America.
A nephew of Johann Michael Willheit, Johann Friederich Baumgartner, came in 1732 via Philadelphia. He settled in Virginia near his uncle Michael. Friederich's younger brother, Gottfried Baumgartner, also came to America, at a later time in 1749. Gottfried did not move to Virginia as his brother did.
Another cousin of Johann Michael, Anna Rosina Willheit, who was married to Samuel Abendschön, came in the same ship as Gottfried. Since records are scarce for married women, there is no actual proof that she did arrive. If she did come, they settled in Berks County, Pennsylvania.
These records show that relatives did not always join together in the new country. Sometimes brothers, close in age, lived in different states.
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.