*[Wie lange kannst du die Luft anhalten?]
I wish to add a comment or two to the previous Note. Research on the Christler family was done by Gary Zimmerman and Johni Cerny in the “ Before Germanna ” series and it has some obvious errors but the general picture looks OK. Other information was drawn from “ An Account of the Ancestry and Descendants of Johann Caspar Stoever of Pennsylvania ” by Vernon Stiver and Patricia R. Donaldson. Lambsheim is a small village of one church. It is a few miles west of the Rhine River and northwest of Ludwigshafen. Members of the Lotspeich family came from Frankenthal, but they are probably unrelated to the families we are discussing.
The Razor family may have known individuals in the Robinson River Valley (RRV) before they moved there. Gene Dear did some research on the family and I repeat some of it here. The immigrant was George Adam Raueser who came to America on the ship Mary and Sarah in 1754. He settled in New Jersey, where he lived until he moved to the RRV. In 1774, the bought 100 acres there from Frederick and Sarah Baumgardner. The family can be found in the German Lutheran Church records from 1776 to 1788.
I have noticed that the ship Loyal Judith , which brought Andreas Gaar in 1732, also brought a man by the name George Adam Raueser, the same name as Gene Dear reported arriving in 1754. Were these two people related? Could there be some relationship between the Rauesers and the Gaars, even just an awareness of each other?
The pastor at Illenschwang, where the Gaars had been living, wrote that Andreas Gaar and three hundred other souls emigrated to America. It has always been my desire to research the church records of Illenschwang to see if any of the names there duplicate the names on the ship Loyal Judith . These records are not available on microfilm here in America. They are on microfiche in Regensburg in the Lutheran archives there.
On one trip of Eleanor and myself, we went to the Regenburg archives. A German friend had phoned ahead to set an appointment time. When we arrived, our reception was chilly but I asked for the Illenschwang records. What I wanted were the comments of the pastor in the front of one of the books and it wasn’t difficult to find these. We had three pages printed and we were finished in less than a half hour. The director of the archive was amazed that an American had found what he wanted in such a short period of time. His attitude changed and he brought out his picture book of an extended visit to America. So we sat with him while he went through the trip. It would be nice to go back and spend lots of time with the Illenschwang records.
*[How long can you hold your breath?]
(29 Mar 07)
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.