John Blankenbaker's Germanna History Notes
Note 2151
At the Century (xx01) and the Half Century (xx51) Notes, I take time to express what I attempt to do in these Notes. They are distributed by the Germanna Colonies Mailing List service at Rootsweb, but my comments should not be taken as a definition of the content of that service. What I am giving are my
personal views
of my efforts for the List, not an "official view" of the List contents.
Remembering that more than two thousand of these notes have been written, and that I do not like to repeat myself, what I am left to write about is largely history that has not been reported before. That is the ideal; I do repeat myself. You will have to forgive me for these duplications in which I hope an alternative approach will help to clarify questions. Also, for fun, I sometimes give little stories that have no connection with Germanna, but have some connection with Germany. When I say Germany, that is a short hand notation for all of the regions where German is spoken including Austria and Switzerland. Many of our citizens have a heritage that goes back to these latter two countries.
To define the scope that I emphasize, I consider a Germanna citizen to be anyone who lived on the east side of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the Eighteenth Century, and who has "German blood" in their veins. To give one example, Richard Burdyne was probably not German but he married Catherine Tanner, a Germanna citizen. Therefore, all of the descendants of Richard Burdyne may be considered Germanna citizens by my definition. Richard Burdyne did make a contribution to the early fund raising effort of the German Lutheran Church in the Robinson River Valley. (This alone would show that he was not a Lutheran, as the only people who were listed were the non-Lutherans.)
Broadly, the history in general, or specifically, of our Germanna citizens, or the history of even one family is fair game. I am a little hesitant to write about genealogy because others know so much more than I do.
I do use the term "Robinson River Valley" to describe one area in which so many of our ancestors lived. Not only do we have the Lutherans of the Second Colony, but we have members of the First Colony who were of the Reformed faith. Also, many people who came later were Reformed, and some may have been Anabaptists or Catholic. So, I use the geographical term Robinson River Valley and not a term such as Hebron, which has religious affiliation connotations. For those of you who are not that familiar with the geography of Virginia, the Robinson River Valley is roughly, but not exactly, equal to the present day Madison County.
In the next Note I will return to the retirement plans of Alexander Spotswood where so many of our ancestors had a role.
(29 Jul 05)