A question was asked about the Scheible family which lived in the village of Neuenbürg, from where the Fleshmans, Schlucters, and Blankenbakers came. In fact, Margaret James Squires, who found all of these families there in the Protestant church records, told me that she thought the Scheibles were related to the other families, but that she could not prove it. The reason that one has suspicions is often that one family acts as baptismal sponsors for the children of other families. The Lutherans prefer that the sponsors be relatives, but it is not an absolute necessity. At the Hebron Lutheran Church outside Madison, Virginia, we observe the sponsors are usually related by marriage or blood to the parents.
A year ago when I was in Gresten, Austria, I was standing outside the house on the Pletzenberg farm watching the owner and an electrician install a new circuit distribution panel in the house. I looked down on the ground at the discarded cardboard box which the panel had come in, and I saw that it was addressed to Scheible. The name caught my attention, but I did not think much of it until I was back home and looking at a map of the farms where we generally had been. It was then that I saw that the Scheiblau farm was only about one-half mile from the Plankenbichl farm, from where the Blankenbakers had come. By accident, I do have a photo of the Scheiblau farm which is posted on the web page of Germanna photos.
When you look at the sequence of the original land patents in the Madison area, you will see these names in order:
When one considers the close physical association in Austria of the farms with appropriate names, the suspicions of Mrs. Squires in Neuenbürg, and the land associations in Virginia, one feels that indeed the families were related and that Scheibles came from Austria. They probably left there about 1652 in the great exodus of Protestants from that land.
Johni Cerny and Gary Zimmerman (in "Before Germanna", vol. 5) found that Johann Georg Scheible and Maria Eleonora (perhaps Berger) were the parents of these five daughters:
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.