Repeating, from the last Note, Don Yoder’s translation of the entry in the Death Register of the Freudenberg church for March 13, 1738,
"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 wife and children, others single male persons, namely": (Fifty-four individuals are indicated).
There is nothing wrong with the date. Most of the principalities which were to make up the future Germany had switched by this time to the New Style calendar. The English had not, and they would have called the date March 13, 1737/38 meaning that by the Old Style calendar it was still 1737 but that they recognized some people were calling this the year 1738.
We do have doubts about the general knowledge of American geography by the Germans. As an example, we have the petition of the Brombachs in Germany stating, "...their Melchior had emigrated to the Island of Carolina." (See B. C. Holtzclaw, " The Ancestry and Descendants of the Nassau-Siegen Immigrants . . ", page 49.) However, this may be simply that the 1713 immigrants were uncertain as to where they intended to go. Johann Justus Albrecht, their recruiter, had mentioned mines in South Carolina.
A much more fundamental objection comes from the pastor writing the statement on the date they left. How could he know the destinations of the ships on that date when he was writing in Freudenberg in March? The fact is that he could not know. There were no advance travel reservations. It would not be until the departing party arrived at Rotterdam that they would find out what ships were leaving and for where. In fact, passenger ships for Georgia or for Virginia were rare and they did not make that trip every year. Look at how many of our Germanna Colonists came to Virginia through Pennsylvania just because they could not get a ship directly to Virginia. By 1738, the pattern was that passenger ships for the Germans left from Rotterdam for Pennsylvania, not for Virginia.
There is one simple conclusion. The pastor wrote of the Island of Georgia as a synonym for America. What he wrote should not be taken as an authority. In spite of what he wrote, it is possible that the departing persons did find a ship going to Georgia, and that they went there, but we should not take the pastor’s statement as the authority for saying so. Several people, including the web page cited in the last note,
do so
.
(18 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.