As we have been studying the German families in the Little Fork, we must be impressed by the narrow geographic range in Germany from which they came. After you mention Trupbach, Seelbach, and Freudenberg, you have just about covered the villages of their origins. We have not emphasized it much, but in their ancestry many of the same names keep popping up again and again.
For this Note, we have another man who lived in Trupbach, Johannes Noeh (Nöh). He was born 4 Mar 1694 at Klafeld, with Johannes Heite of Seelbach as his godfather. He married Maria Clara Otterbach of Trupbach in 1717. The couple lived at Trupbach, where five children were born, four of whom (we presume) came to America with them in 1734 (the fifth died). The birth records are taken from the Siegen church record, where the residents of Trupbach went to church. John Nay, as he was usually called in Virginia, died before 1745.
Only one son seems to have survived. (Two were born in Germany and one died in Germany). The mother was born in 1692, so she was 42 years old when they came to America. Little is known of the daughters of whom there should have been three that came to America, but proof of this is lacking. Therefore, most of the Nay genealogy depends on the son (Johann) Jacob Noeh.
Jacob Nay had a grant of 146 acres adjacent to Otterbach, Button, Dewit, and Harris, on 11 May 1752. This was an early grant in Culpeper County, which was a "young" county. He was twenty years old on this date. As an older citizen, he appears to have moved to Fauquier County. B. C. Holtzclaw seems to have identified eight sons and one daughter that he had. Two sons, John and Jacob, Jr., are in the 37th Culpeper Class, along with two Utterbacks who were on the neighboring farm.
In the 1787 Culpeper Personal Property Tax List, there seems to be only John Nay who had only one horse and one cow to declare.
Jacob Nay was the northernmost German on the Prof. Hackley map. There were at least two more Germans to the north of these though. First, was John Button and, second, was Tillman Weaver. A third possibility is James Spilman, who abutted Weaver. Whether this Spilman was a German or not is unknown to me at this time.
(12 Dec 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.