Another family, or perhaps more exactly, a person, who had moved within Germany prior to the emigration to America was Cyriacus Fleischmann. The records at the church imply that he was from Klings, Fischberg, Eisenach, Henneberg, Saxony. Some of these names are thrown in just to help located the area. Before the modern reunification of Germany, this was just over the border in East Germany. Also, almost no research has been done in the churches there, largely because no microfilming was permitted.
Cyriacus Fleshman's wife had earlier married into a family which also moved about, the Blankenbakers. The combination may have encouraged her descendants, through the experiences handed down in the family from all sources (if not through the genes). Anna Barbara Schöne's descendants, through her first husband, John Thomas Blankenbaker, included Margaret Thomas, who is said in some histories to be the first white woman west of the Allegheny Mountains. Other histories say that the first white girl born in Kentucky was a Fisher, another Blankenbaker descendant. I really won't say that I believe the stories just because the "first" of anything is so hard to prove. It does show that the Blankenbakers in Austria, probably starting shortly after the end of the Thirty Years' War about 1650, were on the western frontier of America after not much more than a hundred years had passed.
Another family who moved from Mittelfranken to the Rhine country, as did the Blankenbakers, was the Bechk family. This family left Gemmingen with other families, who were to eventually land in Virginia, but the fate of the Bechk family is unknown. (In the early eighteenth century, many of the German pastors used what we would consider extra letters in writing.)
The Zimmermann family was from Steffisburg, Canton of Bern, Switzerland, before they lived in Sulzfeld. Other of the early Germanna pioneers had ancestors from Switzerland. One branch of the Willheit ancestry came from there. John Harnsberger is said to be from Switzerland himself, as he was born there. I have wondered if the family, or he in particular, had moved to Germany, but then decided to come on to America.
Just today, I was looking at a map to locate where Hans Herr (1710 Mennonite) had lived in Germany. Surprises of surprises, the farm he lived on is only about two miles west of Wagenbach, where George Utz and Maria Sabina Volck lived (Folg was the way John Hoffman wrote Volck). George Utz and Hans Herr could well have been acquainted with each other. So it is no wonder that I, a descendant of George Utz, take a special interest in Hans Herr.
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.