Not all of the people in the American Gutelius family believe that Johann Peter Gutelius was a German. First, the name is deceptive in that it does not sound or look German. It is hard to say how an alternative theory as to his origin developed but it has been proposed that he was the son of Adam Frederick Gutelius, and a Frenchman, and an army surgeon for the French. As former physician to the Queen of France, he was banished from the country because he married out of his station. He married Anna Maria Deitzler from Holland and joined a ship there going to America.
This information, of unknown origin, was published in the United States in a book in 1916. Those of us who were around then will remember the hysteria that engulfed the nation then. Everyone whose name was Schmidt became a Smith. Towns formerly named Berlin became Berwin. The last thing that anyone wanted to be was a German. It would seem to me that Johann Peter became a Frenchman to escape the aura that would have befallen on him for being of German origin.
By several counts, the Gudelius/Gutelius family has a claim to being at least an allied member of the Germanna community. In my estimation, they come from the same region, share many ancestors, and excepting problems of 1738, would have been members of the Germanna community. I believe the Gutelius family would go further in their European research if they accepted their German origin and worked with known sources of information. In fact, a lot of it has been worked for them already.
In the Germanna community, we have some fanciful stories pertaining to some of the immigrants. The first that comes to mind is Ludwig Fischer (Lewis Fisher). The story varies slightly but sometimes he is a Baron, sometimes he is just a nobleman, sometimes he is the owner of half of Germany. He had to come to America because he killed a deer in a royal park. It didn't help to restrain the story that his will mentioned "my estate in Germany".
I can't remember which family it was, but there is a story that runs something like, "Two sisters were visiting a ship and it sailed before they could get off so they had to come to America."
My wife, Eleanor, and Sgt. George have an ancestor in common, Michael Garoutte. Some fanciful stories have been told about him. He was a friend of Lafayette and went to school with him. He was only one step removed from the royal family in France. He came to America to help them in their fight for independence, and he brought his own ship which was used to help the Americans. He did not get a pension from the U.S. because the records were lost. He married an innkeeper's daughter in New Jersey.
I did some research on the few known facts and they indicated to me that Michael did bring his own ship and he intended to be a privateer. Unfortunately, the ship was burned by the British, and Michael was wounded and left to die, but a Quaker innkeeper brought him home, where his daughter Sophia nursed him back to health and married him. Anyway, I used to tell my mother-in-law that she was descended from a pirate who married the bartender's daughter. She had the knack of turning off her hearing when she did not want to hear anything, and so she never heard the whole story. Her version and my version weren't all that much different, just a few nuances here and there.
(27 Jun 00)
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.