Were our ancestors fixed in one location? Did a family always live in the same village? Some of them did live in one place for a long time. A German friend, in showing us his village, pointed to one house and said that the family living there had occupied the house for eight hundred years. (For all that I know, maybe other families considered them as “newcomers”.) In some villages it would seem that the inhabitants never left. In Klings, for example, the most common name today is Fleischmann. Yet our Cyriacus Fleshman left there about 1700.
There were occupational movements. Some workers were recruited because of their special skills. I have read that the rulers in Prussia recruited Dutch workers who were skilled in water diversion and dike building. The Prussians had low lying, wet land that needed improvement. Some people, especially those who attended the universities and often became pastors and teachers, had to move to find work.
I have mentioned Cyriacus Fleischmann who moved a significant distance from Klings to Neuenbuerg. We are not quite sure why he moved. We could also mention Nicolaus Yaeger who moved a good distance. Whether these moves were occupationally related, we don’t know. Right now that would be our best guess.
Those people who were entering the guilds had to follow a period of travel to work with different masters. Some of these ventures might take the journeyman a good distance from home.
Religion was a cause of many major movements. As an example, when the ruler of Austria decreed after the Thirty Years War that one must be a Catholic or leave the country, thousands of them did leave, including the Blankenbakers and probably the Scheibles from our Germanna Colonies. Other major movements occurred when the Anabaptists (Mennonites and Amish) left Switzerland for Germany. The movement of the Huguenots from France was an injection of new people into Germany.
War disrupted the lives of many people, especially in southern Germany. Some people left their village for security and never returned.
The scarcity of land led many people to migrate. At first, the Eastern regions received many people, but later America beckoned strongly. In these relocations, the destination was outside Germany but they demonstrate that people would move for sufficient reason.
Looking at the history of Trupbach, one is surprised to see so many new names in going from the Seventeenth Century to the Eighteenth Century.
(14 Dec 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.