Among the people who moved to southwestern Pennsylvania, I have mentioned Abraham Thomas. He married Susannah Smith of Culpeper, and since others of the Smiths moved to Kentucky, it may be that the Smiths were temporary sojourners in Pennsylvania. Susannah Smith was the daughter of Adam Smith, the son of John Michael Smith, Jr., and Anna Magdalena Thomas. Anna Magdalena was the aunt of Abraham Thomas, so Susannah Smith was a first cousin once removed from Abraham Thomas.
Margaret Thomas has been mentioned by family historians as "the first white women west of the Monongahela". Klaus Wust, at the First Germanna Seminar, highlighted the importance of the intra-European migrations, prior to the trans-Atlantic migration, as a selection factor for the pioneering and adventuring spirit found in America. Some of Margaret Thomas Hupp's ancestors, a bare century earlier, started the westward trek from Gresten, Austria. She was a continuation of this spirit.
With a good Thomas representation in Pennsylvania, it is interesting to note that a member of the Hardin family also lived for a while in Pennsylvania. Now the Hardins are not a Germanna family per se, but they were closely associated with the Holtzclaw family. This association was close enough so that B. C. Holtzclaw devoted a chapter to the Hardins in his book, The Ancestry and Descendants of the Nassau-Siegen Immigrants . . . Not many Notes ago, I drew attention to a possible Thomas and Holtzclaw connection. B. C. Holtzclaw emphasized a Holtzclaw and Hardin connection. Are there more connections or influences in this triangle than we know?
If any readers know of other Germanna families who lived temporarily or permanently in southwestern Pennsylvania, please let all of us know. For references for research in this area, see the list on page 244 of
Beyond Germanna
, from an article on the Hupp family. One of these, by Horn, was known by the authors to be suspect. Independently, Dolores Rutherford said that
The Horn Papers
are, in part, fraudulent. The first two volumes, written by W.F. Horn and published by the Greene Co., PA, Historical Society in 1945, have been debunked and proven to be fraudulent information by Arthur P. Middleton and Douglass Adair in an article published in the
Wm. & Mary Quarterly
, 3rd Series, Vol. 4, pgs. 409-445 (1947). Volume 3 of the
Horn Papers
, the book of maps, is all right, but the first two volumes are mostly a figment of Mr. Horn's imagination.
(13 Jan 06)
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.