Klaus Wust alerted us to many obscure documents and some that were not so obscure. For example, he mentioned in the article, that I cited a few notes back, a man by the name of Philip Jacob Irion, who left, for personal reasons, Baden-Durlach, where he was the Commercial Secretary and became an agent for a Scottish merchant firm. Irion lived in Culpeper County in 1766 when he wrote a letter to his brother in Kaiserlautern:
"Everyone enjoys such great liberties as may not be found anywhere else. I would not mind if there were a thousand times as many inhabitants here, who, if it could be, should all be Germans. Inasmuch as these are reputed for their diligence and industry, whereas others indulge in idleness, doing nothing but riding about and planting scarcely so much as to provide for their households, the saying probably came about that a German could thrive on a rock." [The complete Irion letter is translated in Don Yoders book, Rhineland Emigrants.]
Incidentally, Philip Jacob Irion should appear somewhere in our Colonial records. If anyone knows of the man, please speak up.
Many of the errors that Klaus made were the result of copying from other historians. Sometimes there are not enough hours in the day to verify every fact against the original sources. He accepted that Scott was the Captain of the ship which brought the Second Germanna colony because several major Germanna writers had said so. After he read the findings of James Brown and the reproduction of the statement in Beyond Germanna, he had his doubts. When I wrote that Scott was the name of the ship and that perhaps Tarbett was the name of the captain, he went to the colonial records and searched for himself. He agreed with me that no Captain by the name of Scott could be found. He seemed to accept my arguments; at least, he asked permission to quote me.
For the Oliver story, i.e., the story of the ship Oliver which was a disaster for so many potential Germanna colonists from Freudenberg, Klaus researched in the notarial files of the City Archives of Rotterdam. He published this material in the Newsletter of the Swiss-American Historical Society in 1984, and several years later in Beyond Germanna.
He seemed to be at home in the archives of Bern, Rotterdam, Münster, and the America sources. His findings, as I have given them here, were the first time that I felt that I was getting the correct story on the Germanna colonists. There were errors, but he had the sense to recognize that a lot that had been written was bunk.
(17 May 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.