Two of the families who came to America through the port of Philadelphia were the Christler family and the Gaar family. The Christler family came first, in 1719, and settled in Franconia Township, in what is Montgomery County today. One of the members of the family was Johann Theobald Christele, aged nine years when he left Germany. (The origins of this family are recounted in " Before Germanna ," volume 11.) The Gaar family arrived in 1732 and lived for a short period of time in Germantown, outside Philadelphia.
In 1732, Rosina Gaar was nineteen years old. At this time, Theobald was about twenty-three years old. The exact dates that the families moved to Virginia are unknown. The first record in Virginia for Theobald Christler is a land purchase in 1736. Theobald was the only member of his family to move to Virginia. His father remained in Pennsylvania; in fact, his father's will is recorded in Philadelphia County in 1748.
I have often wondered where Rosina and Theobald were married. Theobald's relocation to Virginia, away from his family, suggests that they may have married in Pennsylvania and moved with her family to Virginia. On the other hand the Garrs are said to have remained in Pennsylvania only a short time. In the " Garr Genealogy ," the first child of Theobald and Rosina is given, by the Garrs, a birth year of 1737. More exactly, only one child, Henry, is given a birth year, and he happens to be listed first in the sequence of children. It is possible that the marriage took place in Pennsylvania and that would account for the relocation of Theobald to Virginia. It remains a mystery as to why the Gaars moved to Virginia.
Earlier we reviewed the family of Theobald and Rosina as given by the Garrs. They omitted the daughter Dorothy and added a son Andrew which later historians have corrected. With these corrections, the Garr's list of children agrees with the will of Theobald Crisler. In Virginia, the name was spelled Christler, Crisler, and Crisler.
The origins of the family were probably in Switzerland where the family name is to be found in Canton Bern. The spelling of the name in some German records as Christele even suggests this as the ending "li" or "le" is a typical Swiss ending. Probably the family relocated to Germany from Switzerland in the late seventeenth century when many Swiss and Germans moved into southwest Germany as a part of the repopulation efforts following the destruction of The Thirty Years' War.
Theobald's father, Leonard Christler, married Anna Maria Bender (in America, an equally good spelling of this would be Pender). Johannes Bender, Anna Maria's father, Leonard Christler, and another son-in-law of Johannes Bender, Christian Merkel, sold their property in 1719 and immigrated to Pennsylvania ("Before Germanna").
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.