Next we come to a set of 1713 emigrants who came from another village, outside of the area of the previous emigrants. This new set consisted of bachelors. The village they came from was Müsen, about seven miles due north of the town of Siegen.
Melchoir Brombach was a first cousin of Johannes Kemper , fellow emigrant in 1713. The age of Melchoir is uncertain, as no christening record has been found for him. B.C. Holtzclaw estimated a birth of 1686, which would make him 27 years of age when he emigrated. Apparently, he had not obtained approval and had not paid his taxes when he emigrated, so the authorities attempted to recover the taxes from his inheritance. As a consequence of this action, his identity is proven. He left no male children in Virginia, so the Brombachs are not direct descendants of his.
Johannes Kemper was a 21-year-old bachelor when he emigrated in 1713. Later a brother and a half-sister emigrated to Pennsylvania.
Ancestors of the Merten ( Martin ) family of Müsen seem to have lived at Ferndorf, the next door village to Müsen. The 1713 emigrant, Johann Jost Merten, was a 22-year-old bachelor when he left.
Probably the three bachelors we have been discussing were similarly motivated. Economic conditions were not good and perhaps the young men did not have good prospects for jobs. Two of them, at least, probably had no marketable skills as a result of an apprenticeship program and journeyman experience. So the trip was perhaps an attempt to break out into new endeavors.
A village, Eisern, to the south of Siegen about three miles, sent two families. The area was controlled by the Catholics and the Reformed people were under duress. Whether this was the motivation for Johannes Hofmann we do not know. The diary of his brother, Johann Wilhelm Hofmann , a later emigrant to Pennsylvania, would indicate that it was a factor. Johannes Hofmann may have been facing the same problem as the bachelors from Müsen. He was a 21-year-old bachelor with perhaps poor immediate economic prospects.
The Weber family was perhaps related to the Hofmanns but the exact relationship is not clear. The Webers have an association with Eiserfeld, adjacent to Eisern. The church where the records were kept is at Roedgen, a couple of miles from Eisern. The Reformed people who lived in this area also seemed to have attended the church in Siegen. Apparently, the Weber family, when they left, consisted of Johann Henrich Weber, his wife Anna Margaretha Huttmann of Eisern, a son Johannes, 20, a daughter Cathrin, 16, and Tillman, 12.
There was one more member of the group who came in 1714 and that was Johann Justus Albrecht . His origins are entirely unknown and there is no reason to believe that he originated in the Nassau-Siegen area, though that is where he recruited the other members.
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.