The sources of information about our families in Germany are many. In some cases, the immigrants brought information with them which was preserved in the family. An excellent example of this was the Garr family. In other cases, the information was skimpy but it was a starting point. That Schwaigern was the starting point for a family was deduced from a misspelled name. Margaret James Squires, while searching for another family, found the families of Utz and Volck, which she recognized as Germanna names. Once a geographical area is known, it often pays to search in the general vicinity for other names. The area around the town of Siegen was known to be the home of the First Germanna Colonies. Information was to be found in the church records and in the archives. One of the earliest reports on the German origins of the First Colony was published by William John Hinke in the " Virginia Magazine of History and Biography " in volumes 40 and 41 (1932 and 1933).
In discussing the Cuntze/Koontz family, I failed to mention that some branches of the family had a Germanna connection through the daughter of John Caspar Stöver, Sr. The father was the first pastor of the Second Colony and is to be counted as a Germanna citizen. The daughter, Anna Elisabetha Catherine Stöver, married Johannes Kuntz with the ceremony performed by her brother, John Caspar Stöver, Jr.
The Weissgerber family in Germany became the Whitescarver family in Virginia. The conversion of the name is the result of taking the equivalent of Weiss which is White and of using some similar phonetic equivalents in the second part. Other American spellings are also probable.
The Steinseifer name has many variations in America. Ryan Stansifer had an article in the last issue of Beyond Germanna containing information found in the Siegen archive. The information was a report of action taken in 1743 when John Henry Hoffman wrote to Johannes Steinseifer and asked him to bring along money to Virginia which was due to him. The families were more closely involved with each other than this, as the wives of the two men were both Schusters (but they were not sisters).
One of the families who came to Virginia on the ill-fated ship Oliver was that of Hymenaeus Creutz (as the name was recorded by the pastor in Freudenberg). Previously, it was not recognized that the man did come to Virginia, but Clovis Miller showed that the father, as Hyman Critz, did arrive in Virginia and was associated in southwest Virginia with the John Frederick Miller family. Up to now, this family has not been recognized as a Germanna family. It is not clear how the name is spelled today but it would be very desirable to locate them and to add their history to the Germanna history.
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.