Alexander Spotswood, in a 1724 letter to Col. Nathaniel Harrison, the Deputy Auditor of H.M. Revenues, said that he and his partners paid the passage money for 70 odd Germans and settled them on the [Spotsylvania] tract in 20 odd tenements. Descendants of these Germans, later in the Century, said that the emigrants had numbered about 80 people. It is true that the statement of Spotswood leaves open the possibility that he and his partners did not pay the transportation costs of all of the Germans, but the later statements of the descendants would support the idea that the partners paid and settled all of the Germans on their tract.
Recently, there was a discussion about obtaining the records for the German Lutheran Church in Culpeper County ("Hebron") on microfilm. The great majority of these records apply when the church was in Culpeper County, though some of the records were later when the church was in Madison County. Years ago, when the Library of Virginia would make and sell copies of microfilms, I purchased a copy this microfilm. This included the Baptisms, Communion Lists, and general records, including many financial records. Because I had to go to microfilm reader to use these records, I paid a significant sum of money to have the roll converted to a CD so I could read them on my computer. The professional service that did this gave me a cut-rate price because they said the quality of the microfilm was so poor that they could not do a good job. This should be a warning to anyone who proposes to use the microfilm.
I gave a copy of the CD to Nancy Dodge and we undertook to read the Communion Lists which had never been published in their entirety. The information was very hard to read. It seemed as though we were guessing in many cases. By bouncing our individual readings off each other, we improved the general consensus.
Andreas Mielke also became interested in these records and he too read them. There were differences from what Nancy and I had read. All the time we were comparing the Communion Lists to what other sources we had read, though these were often incomplete. Finally, after we had read all that we could, we made a list of the questionable items. Then Andreas and I visited Hebron and, through the kind cooperation of Pastor Larson, we were permitted to see the originals. This resolved some of the differences and uncertainties. Only a very few, perhaps two or three out of thousands, remained ambiguous.
As we looked at the original documents, we realized that the difficulty was often in the hand written documents as much as in the microfilm. But microfilm does deteriorate and it had contributed to the problems of working with it.
The final result as published in "Hebron" Communion Lists by Mielke and Blankenbaker [and dedicated to Nancy Moyers Dodge] is the best source document available and by far the easiest to use.
(01 Dec 05)
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.