(I leave Hesse temporarily to discuss Germanna families in Kentucky.)
Many Germanna citizens were early residents of Kentucky. Some of these took the northern route through Pennsylvania and down the Ohio River. There are claims that their settlement in Kentucky was contemporaneous with the settlement of the party that Daniel Boone took. I have not made a study of this question, but here are a few names of early Kentucky settlers from Germanna.
Jacob (of Jacob) Holtzclaw applied for a grant of land in Kentucky in 1776 under the "corn law" saying he had already grown a crop in Kentucky. On 20 Feb 1775, he sold his last land in Virginia and moved to Kentucky. Jacob had married Susanna Thomas and the Thomas and Smith family members were also quite early in the westward migration.
Adam Smith has no record at the Hebron church after 1777. He has a daughter Susanna who married a Thomas. Adam's brothers, Zachariah and John, also have no records at the church after 1777. They too moved to Kentucky.
Stephen Fisher has his last record at Hebron in 1778, as does his brother Adam. They emigrated to Kentucky.
Margaret Thomas married Everhard Hupp and moved to southwestern "Pennsylvania". It has been said that she was the first white woman west of the Alleghenies. She was from Culpeper, as were the Hupps.
One family is present in all of these cases in the descendants that I have not mentioned. That is the Blankenbaker family. Jacob Holtzclaw married a Thomas. All of the Germanna Thomases have a Blankenbaker ancestor. The Smiths mentioned here had a Blankenbaker ancestor in the form of Anna Magdalena Thomas. The Germanna Fishers all had a Blankenbaker ancestor, Anna Barbara Blankenbaker. We did not mention the Gaars but all of the surname Gaar/Garr have a Blankenbaker ancestor as do all of the surname Aylor.
Where did the Blankenbakers get this wanderlust? Perhaps it started about 1655 when Matthias Planckenbuehler left Gresten, Austria, because he wished to retain his Lutheran religion. He went almost to the Rhine River, where the family stopped for a couple of generations. Then they set out for the New World. Margaret Thomas Hupp was not much more than a century from Gresten.
There were other Culpeper residents who also went west at the same time. Some of these were English.
(28 Jan 03)
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.