John Blankenbaker's Germanna History Notes

Note 1869

When one looks at the Little Fork lands which were brought to our attention by E. W. Wallace, one of the people who bought land from Jacob Holtzclaw was Harman Miller.  This brought to mind his good friend, Hyman Creutz (Crites or Critz).  To review the situation, in 1738 a group of about fifty people left Freudenberg in the Nassau-Siegen district.  The story of these people was told in Beyond Germanna , among many places, on page 558.

The original data is based on comments entered by Protestant Pastor Göbel in the parish Burial Register of Freudenberg.  Otto Bäumer of Freudenberg published the material in the periodical Heimatland:  Beilage zur Siegener Zeitung, Zweiter Jahrgang , Nr. 10, 1927, 148-149.  Don Yoder translated that article and published it in Pennsylvania Folklife , Winter 1969-70, Vol. XIX, No.2, p.46.  Another English report appears in B.C. Holtzclaw, Ancestry and Descendants of the Nassau-Siegen Immigrants to Virginia 1714-1750 , 1964.  Pastor Göbel wrote:

“As information I wished to write down on these pages that today, the 13th of March 1738, there left for Georgia, the new island under the protection of His Majesty the King of England, out of this land and parish, with the knowledge and consent of the authorities of this our land, the following named persons, some of them householders with a wife and children, others single male persons, namely”:  (Then, Göbel listed the names.)

Survivors of the ill-fated ship on which they came to the Colonies were:

The last three were bachelors.  Harman Miller was a brother of Johann Friedrich Miller.  All of these individuals had been recognized as associated with the Germanna Colonists with the exception of Herman Crites (to use an English version of his name).  The group’s history was clouded by the fact that the Freudenberg pastor had said they were going to Georgia.  Whatever their original intentions were, they joined the ship Oliver in Rotterdam.  This ship sank, after a disastrous voyage, off the cost of Virginia.  Only about one-third of the original passengers survived the trip.

I have been able to bring to the attention of the Crites family their origins and their association with the Germanna colonists.  The family had not known where they originated.  They also had not known that they were to be associated with the Germanna Colonists.  Germanna researchers, such as B. C. Holtzclaw, had not recognized that this family survived the trip.  So we are able to add another Germanna family and to bring to their attention that they were a part of a larger movement.
(14 Apr 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.