Note Nr. 1846 received a favorable reception so I thought I might expand on it. The Germanna Foundation published its first " Germanna Record " in July of 1961. It was devoted to the Hitt, Martin, and Weaver (from Nassau-Siegen) families. The three family histories were written by B. C. Holtzclaw, who had earlier written " The Genealogy of the Holtzclaw Family " (privately published).
This was the first of several publications within the Germanna Record series. It was perhaps unfortunate that the booklets stated on the cover, " Official Publication of the Memorial Foundation of the Germanna Colonies in Virginia Incorporated ". This has been misinterpreted. On the one hand there was the view that the contents are official and not to be doubted. Others, more correctly, said the only meaning of the word "Official" was that there was a formal vote of the Trustees to publish the book.
It was quite easy to point out that there were errors in the Germanna Records . They even contradicted each other. If they were true, I would not be here, as the individual they called Julia F. Blankenbaker was really Julius F. Blankenbaker. The process of correcting the Germanna Records is slow, and earlier faced much opposition within the Foundation .
Germanna Record 13 was published in October 1971, and, then, for a long period of time, nothing more was published. The next book issued was in July of 1990 and this was a reprint of the original Holtzclaw genealogy.
There is now a policy of encouragement which should result in some new publications. We are hopeful that new Crigler and Clore and perhaps Willheit histories will be forthcoming in the near future. From what I have seen, these will be much better researched and documented than the previous genealogies (the Crigler genealogy was done privately).
After
Germanna Record 13
in 1971, the only thing being published was an ANNUAL Newsletter whose content was chiefly short notes of inquiry. In the 1980's, I attempted once to lend some substance to the Letter by writing a critical article of history for it. Someone at the Foundation added an extra paragraph to contradict some of the points that I had made. They published it over my name without even asking for my approval for the added material. This attitude, plus the infrequent appearance of the Newsletter, led me to complain to one of my correspondents. She threw the gauntlet down and said, "Why don't you start a newsletter?". This was in January of 1989 and I accepted the challenge.
(08 Mar 04)
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.