Blessed are the pastors that write down the name of emigrants. Pastor Göbel in Freudenberg wrote, "As information I wished to write down on these pages that today, the 13th of March, 1738, there left for Georgia, the new island under the protection of His Majesty the King of England, out of this land and parish, with the knowledge and consent of the authorities of this our land, the following named persons, some of them householders with wife and children, others single male persons, namely: " The pastor then proceeds to list about eighteen family units, of which I will simply give the surname: Seelbach, Waffenschmidt, Ernstorf, Bach, Müller, Creutz, Weidman, Steinseiffer, Hoffman, Schmidt, Klappert, Gudelius, Müller (brother to the first one), Halm, Schneider, Hirnschal, Schneider, Schneider. I can't tell whether the three Schneiders are related.
The majority of these came from Freudenberg, but some were from Plittershagen, Boeschen, and Antoss. The last two names are not in my atlas but they must have been close by. Plittershagen is just to the south of Freudenberg.
Not many of the people above are to be found in America. B. C. Holtzclaw, in writing about them, placed emphasis on the pastor's statement about Georgia, and then assumed that some of them moved up to Virginia. But his explanation did not explain the total lack of any of the names in Georgia. Klaus Wust, who has studied German immigration at great length, came to the conclusion that the people joined the ship Oliver which was shipwrecked off Virginia within sight of land. The evidence of the Moravian missionaries seems conclusive on this point. This also explains why so few of the names appear in later America history.
Holtzclaw recognized that these names are to be found in Virginia: Bach or Back, the two Müller brothers known as Millers, Wiedmann or Wayman, and John Hofmann (brother of the Hofmann who came in 1734). He did not recognize that the male Creutz made it also. He was a neighbor in Virginia of John Frederick Miller.
As the last note discussed, these names are the male heads which we know from the surnames. If they were married when they came, the odds are against the wife surviving. (Only six of the male surnames, of the eighteen who left, are known in Virginia.) In some cases, the wife alone may have survived, but she remains undetected because of a remarriage. The Atlantic trips were very hard on the children, but it is probable that some survived and were later adopted by others.
Jacob Holtzclaw, who was probably the leader in recruiting and advising the emigrants, must have felt very bad about the outcome.
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.