The second man among the Little Fork Germans, besides John Young, that the Moravian missionaries mentioned was Henry Hoffman. He was of special interest to the Moravians because the brother of Henry, Matthias, was a Moravian located at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. To us, Henry Hoffman is a trouble maker. I say this with an apology to all of his descendants. The problem is that we have too many Hoffmans/Huffmans and they sometimes get confused (by us, not by them). I once made the mistake of confusing this Henry Huffman with another Henry Huffman who is an ancestor.
The other Henry Huffman is identified in two ways. One is that he was a brother of the 1714 immigrant, John Huffman. Second, this branch of Huffmans came from Eisern which is a small village just south of Siegen. This Henry Huffman lived next to his brother John in the Robinson River Valley.
The Little Fork Henry Huffman lived in the Little Fork and he was from Bockseifen. (I can't find the village of Bockseifen on my detailed atlas but it seems to be associated with Freudenberg.) Though a few generations of ancestry seem to be known for this Henry, there is no known connection to any of the other Germanna people. The full name of this Henry was Hans Henrich Hofmann and he was christened 22 Sep 1712. He married Anna Margarethe Huettenhen of Seelbach on 4 Jun 1734. Anna Margarethe has a longer pedigree in Germany than Henry Hofmann does. The young couple arrived in Philadelphia on the same ship as John Young and other Nassau-Siegen emigrants (their honeymoon must have been spent in transit to America).
Henry Huffman of the Little Fork bought land of Jacob Holtzclaw in 1748. Probably he had been renting the land. He also purchased several other tracts and had one grant of 369 acres in 1768. This last parcel had been granted to Deatherage earlier but he sold to Huffman who had it surveyed again and procured a new grant.
Henry and Anna Margaret had thirteen children. John Huffman of the 1714 group had at least ten sons so one begins to appreciate the difficulty of tracing a Huffman genealogy.
The Little Fork Henry was the administrator in 1741 for the estate of John Huffman of Orange County (which is not very definitive because Orange still retained all of its lands in the Piedmont). The identity of this John Huffman is uncertain but perhaps he was a cousin of the Little Fork Henry. The Little Fork Henry wrote his will in 1767 but he did not die until 1783 (will probated then).
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.