In the last note I sent a URL for Doug Mumma's research paper. It’s on the WorldWideWeb and the family is Mumma, and they have organized into a research group. Doug Mumma, who is the author of the research paper, does a very good of writing and presenting the data. It is not hard to follow him, for his explanations and charts make things very clear. It is to be expected, for Doug is a Germanna descendant. [Note to Thom: He could be an interesting future speaker at a seminar, even though he would be talking about the Mumma family, apparently a German family, but not a Germanna family.]
Somewhere in my recent reading, I came across an interesting statistic. Researchers into genetic heredity have come to believe that the probability that a specified father is the actual biological father is only about 0.95 to 0.98. That is, if we could know, in a thousand instances where a child is born, the specified father will not be the true biological father in about 20 to 50 cases. Let us now suppose that it is eight generations back to a Revolutionary War soldier from a living descendant. The odds that the soldier is actually the ancestor of a descendant today is only about two out of three if we take the lower odds above. There is a challenge coming up for the patriotic societies.
At the Germanna Seminar I spoke about probabilities. Perhaps I did not even realize then how problematic much of our history is. But the Pennington research I referred in the last note leads one to pay more attention to the general history and less to the details which may be wrong.
Tomorrow, I will be at the Hans Herr House doing a tour of duty. I do this about once a month. I have no connection with Hans Herr, or the Mennonites in general, but I just like the things they are doing there. Like a lot of organizations, they depend on volunteer labor to put the show on. On September 16, I will be a speaker at the Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society at the Willow Street Mennonite Church, which is down the road from the Hans Herr House about a half mile. I will be talking about the first permanent settlement of Germans in Virginia. So far as I know, I believe the meeting is an open meeting.
Speaking of volunteer labor, another issue of
Beyond Germanna
went in the mail yesterday. The lead article is by Andreas Mielke, with the title, “
No Man-Eaters in Virginia
”. To say anything more would be to steal Andreas’ story line. I wrote some about Ortssippenbücher for Germany. Betty Johnson wrote about the descendants of John Yager of South Carolina. Her list of references runs to about as much as the article itself. Linda Nelson and I went together to do a short piece on the Battern family of Madison County. Cathi Clore Frost clarified some points regarding the children of Michael Clore and Margaret Weaver. Finally there are a couple of pages of photographs of Neuenbürg and of Eisern.
(31 Aug 02)
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.