Questions have been asked about lists of passengers on ships which came to Virginia. To the best of my knowledge, there are no such lists. Unlike Pennsylvania which required the masters of ships to provide the names of male passengers of age sixteen and above, Virginia had no such requirement.
There was a provision of Virginia law that anyone who came into the colony could claim fifty acres of land. This rapidly turned into the situation whereby anyone who paid the transportation for someone coming to Virginia could claim the fifty acres of land.
In application to our Germanna settlers, we have the following: The members of the First Germanna Colony paid a fraction of their transportation and Alexander Spotswood paid the balance. This was about a fifty-fifty split. But because he had not paid one hundred percent of any individual's transportation cost, Spotswood could not claim the fifty acres of land. Instead, he had paid about fifty percent of the transportation cost of forty-two Germans. He would have done better had the bargain been structured so that he paid the full transportation costs of twenty-one Germans. The Germans though, met the requirements for claiming fifty acres per head (person) and many of them appeared in court to make their claim. These court records are very brief but they come about as close to immigration records as we get in Virginia.
Actually, the First Colony members gained very little by applying for these headrights. They could not use them in the Northern Neck where their lands were located. They could sell them for use outside of the Northern Neck and a few of the Germans did do that. One headright was worth no more than five shillings, because one could, instead of using headrights, just simply pay five shillings per fifty acres.
Spotswood formed a land development enterprise with several individuals, but the major partner, after Spotswood, was Robert Beverley. This partnership settled the Second Colony members on a tract that straddled the Rapidan River and extended out to the present day Culpeper Court House. Spotswood kept a list of the people for which he paid the transportation (this time, individual immigrants were assigned to the partners). Eventually he had to pay something for his lands in spite of the legislation designed to make this unnecessary. At that time he came up with the name of forty-eight of the Germans. For a variety of reasons, we identify many of these individuals as members of the Second Colony, and so the list itself becomes a clue as to who forty-eight of the members of the Colony were.
This list is not, technically, a ship's list. It is a list of people for whom Spotswood paid the transportation costs. The names will be given in a subsequent note.
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.