John Blankenbaker's Germanna History Notes

Note 1522

The individual we are following, Johann Peter Gudelius, arrived at Philadelphia on 31 August 1750, and registered as Johann Peter Gutelius.  This is a perfectly natural spelling of the name.  As we know, the letters t and d are often interchanged.  When he signed his name, he used typical German letters, not Roman letters.  Then, eleven years later, Peter Gudelius, in Lancaster County, PA, took out his naturalization (29 March 1761).

He was a sponsor of Johann Peter Engel in Manheim parish on 14 March 1772.  He wrote his will, 5 August 1773, with his name as Gudelius.  The inscription on his gravestone is written in the German language.  The township of Manheim where he had lived is very German and oriented to the Reformed religion.

Now I want you to take a guess as to what nationality many of his descendants say he was.

This is a man who writes with German letters, travels with Germans, has a perfectly good German name, writes his will in German, lives among Germans, and has the inscription on his tombstone carved in the German language.

Very strangely, many of his descendants say that he was French.  They add to the story that he was a doctor in the French army who was banished because he married outside his station in life.  They have no facts to support his French origins or presence except someone, out of the thin air, said so.

Faced with the facts that I have recounted, one wonders how the descendants could hold to this story.  Probably a century or more ago, a lot of guessing took place and for some reason the toss of the coin showed "France".  But one very telling factor is that the published genealogy of the family was published in 1916.  If your memory goes back this far, you will remember that sentiment in 1916 was very much against anything German.  Schmidts became Smiths.  Berlins became Berwins.  People did everything they could to deny any connection to Germany.  Probably this influenced the author of the Gudelius genealogy.

My information comes from Jost Gudelius who, with his family, are good friends by now.  We visit them on our trips to Germany.  The family's web page is www.gudelius.de , for more information in both English and German.

I will be away from my post here for a few days.  The first reason is that Eleanor and I will be attending the annual Rayborn L. Zerby lecture at Bates College in Maine.  Prof. Zerby was Eleanor's father, who taught at Bates for more than thirty years.  He was well remembered by years of students who established an endowment fund for the purpose of having a speaker each year in his honor.  The speaker this year is Marcus Borg, and for information on him consult the web here , here , here , or here .  Immediately after this I am going down to Virginia for research purposes.  Sometimes one cannot beat a look at the original records, especially when the microfilm is lousy.
(09 Nov 02)