THE EARLIEST GERMANNA FAMILY?
Urban TANNER, Part 1:
I believe I have found the earliest Germanna family to leave Germany. True, they did not get to American immediately. In fact, they were eleven years in getting to America. In this time they had many adventures, most of which are known only indistinctly.
I have just read the Catholic Church Records for Westhofen in the Palatinate. I found one Baptismal Record which reads in essence (the Catholics use a lot of Latin):
"25 August 1708. Baptized a daughter named Anna Catharina of Vrbano Danner and his wife Anna Maria. The sponsor was Anna Catharina Raeder.”
So far I have not found any earlier Baptismal Records and some later records suggest that there were previous children to Anna Catharina. This may mean that the family had only recently moved to Westhofen.
Westhofen does have a Protestant church, so the fact that Anna Catharina was baptized in the Catholic church surely means that at least one of the parents was Catholic.
Remember that “D” and “T” are often confused going from Germany to English speaking countries. In fact, confusion exists in Germany also. Remember that the German Lutheran church in the Robinson River Valley of Virginia once referred to “Urban Tanner”, who was paid for going to Williamsburg on church business. In other church records, the name is spelled as Tanner, Danner, or Dan. A real clue as the German identity of the man known in Virginia as Robert Tanner is the given name Urban which is very rare. The name is so unusual that Urban Danner probably changed it to Robert which more people understood, especially in the English-speaking world where he lived for eleven years before he came to Virginia. During this time, he probably learned some English which may be why the church in Virginia chose him to go to Williamsburg.
When Robert Tanner (Turner in the record) applied for his headrights, he said he came in 1720 with his wife Mary and children Christopher, Christina, Catherine, Mary, and Parva (Barbara). This is very consistent with the Westhofen evidence. So far, there is no evidence as to why the Tanner family chose Virginia.
(16 May 2007)
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.