*[Erzaehle mir etwas von dir.]
First, I should correct the spelling of a word I used in the last note. It is one Ortssippenbuch but it is two Ortssippenbücher. To make the plural, the umlaut is added to the “u” and “er” is added as the ending.
Next, I have a question for someone who is at the Germanna Foundation Visitor Center Library. It involves the Ortssippenbuch for Sulzfeld. The question is, “Is there a Johann Georg Forckel to be found there in the 1717 time frame or slightly before?”
The reason I ask this question is that Johann Georg Forckel was a sponsor for a son of Matthias Schmidt at St. Marys in London on 31 August 1717. And this same day, Mathias Schmidt was a sponsor for a daughter of Johann Georg Forckel. The choice of the sponsors may have been influenced by the coincidence of the children’s birth on the same day (August 29).
We have one other record of Johann Georg Forckel. In the petition of 16 September 1717 [found by Hank Jones] asking for money to aid their return to Germany, we find the following sequence of names: Johann Georg Forckel, Christofle Uhl, Frederic Kapler, and Hans George Long. We know the last three of these names came from Sulzfeld. Perhaps Johann Georg Forckel did also. Though Matthias Schmidt is associated with Gemmingen, I would hesitate to associate Forckel with Gemmingen. First, he is not on the departure list, and the mutual sponsorship was probably a result of the same birth date for the children.
So far on this petition, which was signed by about fifty heads of households (on behalf of a total of 200 people), we know something about six of the heads. Three are from Sulzfeld, Forckel is named in the St. Mary’s records, and the other two are George Heer (probably Herr from the Unterbiegelhof farm) and Hans Martin Volck who may have been from the Wagenbachhof farm. The last two names are together as it appears the farms are.
Puzzles of this type interest me, even more than my own genealogy. I can’t lay claim to being a genealogist even though I have broken down several brick walls. My interest arose from the puzzle and not from the attempt to fill in spaces on my Ahnentafel. In response to the last Note, it is clear that I am not aware of what is happening in the world of genealogy.
Still, there is one line in my ancestry which I would like to pursue just because it MIGHT lead to Hans Jacob Holtzklau. There is a minor activity for my senior years.
*[Tell me something about you.] (The word order here is the same as the English.)
(05 Apr 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.