John Blankenbaker's Germanna History Notes

Note 338

The twenty-first through the twenty-fifth chapters of Riemer's "The German Research Companion" are:

21) Religions,
22) Germans from Russia,
23) Pennsylvania,
24) Beyond Germany, and
25) Eastern and Alsace neighbors.

Benjamin Franklin has been quoted as saying, "Why should Pennsylvania, which was founded by Englishmen, become a colony of foreigners, who will soon be so numerous that they will be Germanizing us instead of our Anglicizing them?"  It is true that Pennsylvania had a good share of Germans.  A Hessian soldier commented, "If you closed your eyes, you could believe you were in Germany."

The very first Germans to America were at Jamestown but it is not clear whether they even left descendants.  While individuals surely came and went, the first group to come was the Germantown settlers outside of Philadelphia in 1683.  These were augmented by additional people through the following years.  In 1709 and in 1710, large groups came to New York and North Carolina.  Anabaptists started coming in 1710 to Pennsylvania.  In Virginia, the first group, since the Jamestown settlers, came in 1714.  Growth in Virginia was steady but no where near the growth in Pennsylvania.

The growth in the number of German immigrants to America was not uniform but it did increase constantly.  By 1800, nine percent of the population had ties to Germany.  Very large numbers of immigrants started arriving in 1815 and grew throughout the century.  The peak year was 1882, when a record quarter of a million Germans came to America.  In the last few decades, the numbers have fallen sharply.  It has been estimated that altogether, more than eight million Germans have moved to America in our four hundred years of settlement.

Using the 1990 census, it has been estimated that more Americans can be associated with a German background than with any other nationality.  In order, the other groups are the Irish, the English, the Italians, and the Polish.  This is before other Germanic groups are included, as for example, the Alsatians, the Austrians, the Luxemburgers, the Swiss-Germans, and the Russian-Germans.

The claim can be made that the Germans are the major ethnic group in America.

My grandfather, John Henry Blankenbaker, died in 1918.  He was pure German in the sense that all of his ancestors here in America were descended from German immigrants of the early eighteenth century.  Therefore he represents two hundred years of life in America.  I never met him myself, since he died several years before I was born.  It would have been interesting to have talked to him and learned to what extent he thought of himself as German.  He may not have recognized that he was a full-blooded German.