In the turmoil that followed Martin Luther, many people were asking questions about what the church should be and how one should join it. One question was when one should join the church. Should the first step be an infant baptism, or should the baptism be deferred until the person being baptized could make the decision? Also, there was no agreement on the form to be followed in the baptismal ritual.
Several men in Switzerland agreed that one should make the decision when the person was old enough to understand the question, and responsible enough to make the decision. These men (and women) decided to baptize themselves as adults having already been baptized as infants in the Catholic Church. Their enemies, as derision, called them "anabaptists" meaning "re-baptizers", but the name became a point of pride with the Anabaptists.
They had many enemies, especially in the combination of the State and the Reformed Church, which had replaced the Catholic Church. The "State" was upset because one became a citizen by being baptized in the Church. The Church was upset because their thought was being challenged, and they were worried that souls were being lost. The favored method of eliminating them was to simply "eliminate" them. In Switzerland, and in Holland, where there were many adherents, several thousand people were martyred for their belief.
Under circumstances such as this, people are not inclined to keep a lot of records which the authorities might confiscate and use against them. Thus, the Anabaptists have a minimum of baptismal records or Church records. What they did maintain were the stories of the martyrs, often written by the martyrs themselves in prose or song.
Another point emphasized by the Anabaptists was pacifism, a tenet that did not endear them to the civil authorities. This only increased the resolve of the State to eliminate these "uncooperative" citizens. It can hardly be a surprise that a third tenet of the Anabaptists was the separation of the Church and State.
Anabaptist thought and history were to have an impact on the fact that there was a Germanna. In Switzerland, opposition to the Anabaptists continued up to 1700, when the Swiss were trying to "solve" the problem by expelling the Anabaptists. For this reason, Franz Michel went to America to explore the possibilities of establishing colonies of them there. As a side light to his explorations he thought he had found silver mines which tempted another Swiss, Christoph von Graffenried. The two men, in the framework of the George Ritter and Company , recruited several miners and their families in the Siegen area for the work of mining this silver. Had there not been Anabaptists, there never would have been a Germanna.
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.