Recent notes have talked about Michael Thomas and his descendants. This Michael moved to Pennsylvania and thence to Kentucky. Michael had a brother, John, two sisters, and five half-sisters (Kaifers). This note touches on the brother John. I have mentioned before that he definitely appears to have had four daughters and possibly had a son, Michael. The evidence for Michael is not solid but of a character that I am inclined to believe there is truth in the story. So the Michael to be discussed today is the nephew and the cousin of the Michaels that have been mentioned here recently.
The evidence for Michael is that his father seems to have created five tracts of land to give to his children. Four of these went to sons-in-law. One son-in-law received about twice as much and he paid something for it. It is not a stretch of the imagination to believe that this son-in-law, John Railsback, had bought the land that had been intended for the fifth child of John Thomas.
Several people have reported that they can trace their ancestry back to a Michael Thomas in North Carolina, whose family was started before the Revolution. His wife was Barbara. The tradition that these people report is that Michael was a German from Culpeper Co., Virginia. If this tradition is correct, it would seem that his family would be the John Thomas family, he being the immigrant who came as a young lad in 1717. The family of John's brother, Michael, all seem to have gone north and west (some of the women stayed in Virginia). Putting this tradition together with the John Thomas land transactions, it would seem that a plausible conjecture does exist.
If anyone does try to follow through on this, please note that English Thomases moved from Culpeper County to North Carolina about this same time. Furthermore, there were some intermarriages between the English and German Thomas families. So there is some opportunity for the German part to have entered the story. The Culpeper part is hardly to be doubted. For a while, the Michael Thomas of North Carolina was thought to have married Barbara Harnsberger, but this is false. There was a Barbara Harnsberger, and Michael's wife was a Barbara, but Barbara Harnsberger is not quite the right age, and she already has a documented husband. Attention had focused on her because a Michael Thomas had been a witness to the will of John Harnsberger. More likely, the Michael who witnessed the will was the uncle of the proposed North Carolina Michael Thomas.
Some believe that John Thomas, Michael's father, also went to North Carolina. There was a John Thomas, whose land was divided by William, Lewis, Joel, and Jesse Thomas, but this family seems to be English. So it is not entirely clear that John Thomas, the German immigrant of 1717, did go to North Carolina. However, this point is not critical to the question of whether the Michael Thomas in North Carolina was of German extraction.
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the [email protected] 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.