Recently, I acquired the book " Hopeful Journeys " by Aaron Spencer Fogleman. The subtitle on the book is " German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717-1775 ". I obtained my copy from the publisher, the University of Pennsylvania Press, for about twenty dollars in a soft cover. Apparently the book has been out for a while as it has a 1996 copyright date.
A mark of a good book is new insights for the reader and this book certainly fulfills those expectations. Much of the material is based on an analysis of the Northern Kraichgau, where many of the Second Germanna Colony came from; however, the conclusions apply to a much broader region than this.
Besides the detailed studies within the Kraichgau region, there are broader studies of total immigration to the thirteenth colonies, especially during the eighteenth century prior to the Revolutionary War. Because of the interest shown here on the sources of immigration to America, I quote the figures given by Fogleman. He gives the origins of the immigrants in the period from 1700 to 1775 as:
African 278,400,
German 84,500,
Northern Irish 66,100,
Southern Irish 42,500,
Scots 35,300,
English 44,100,
Welsh 29,000,
Other 5,900,
for a total of 585,000 people who came into the colonies. German speaking immigrants are arguably the largest European group in the eighteenth century. These Germans came in three distinct phases, from 1683 to 1709, from 1709 to 1714, and from 1717 to 1775. They settled along the Hudson River in New York, in a wide band from Philadelphia along the Great Wagon Road through Northern Virginia to pockets in the Virginia Piedmont, and in Southern Virginia, the North Carolina Piedmont, and scattered throughout South Carolina.
By far, the most interesting part of the book is a description of internal conditions in Germany. From this, one can discern some of the reasons that the Germans left. Fogleman's studies place great emphasis on the role of partible inheritance and the growth of the population. German families divided their assets, land and homes, among a set of heirs, reducing the assets of each heir to less and less. The result was that individuals did not have a viable set of productive tools. Though Fogleman does not discuss the case, we have read that in the Siegen area individuals were inheriting X days of the output of a forge where X might be a few days per year.
One of the villages that Fogleman does discuss is Schwaigern, a source of many Germanna immigrants. From 1713 to 1773, 305 emigrants left Schwaigern, but the number that left each year is very uneven. None left in 1748, while 67 left in 1749, and 7 left in 1750. One family that left in these years were the Reiners who immigrated through Philadelphia and went immediately to the Robinson River Valley in Virginia.
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.