This article continues the saga of the Swiss emigrant family of Durs Knörr, known in German as Theodor Knerr, outlined in my earlier article, “Pedigree Collapse and the Thirty Years’ War.” For those interested, this article discusses the dire conditions of the southwestern Pfalz (Palatinate) following the near-apocalyptic Thirty Years’ War, which decimated the area and led to the deaths of a majority of the native population.
The postwar resettlement effort in the Pfalz began around 1650, when families first began to return to their towns. Many poorer Protestant Reformed emigrants from the Swiss cantons of Bern, Zürich, and Solothurn, at the invitation of the aristocracy, came to Pfalz-Zweibrücken and Pirmasens (Amts Lemberg) to live as tenants and craftspeople. As a result, a significant majority of families who trace their lineages in the southwestern Pfalz to the 1600s also descend from these Swiss Reformed Auswanderer, among whom we can count Theodor Knerr (Knörr in Alemannic German dialect), whose large family left many descendants in the area.
When the Protestant Gemeinde of Pirmasens resumed its census-taking duties in 1657 (in the Lemberger Kirchenrechnungen), the Schultheiß Oswald Stegner reported only 7 families as having resided in Winzeln, with 2 individuals being Swiss emigrants who had yet to gain approval for their residency. The church list from this time recorded Winzeln’s heads of household as follows:
Hans Dauenhauer
Hans Nicolaus Dauenhauer
Hans Diebold Frank
Theodor Knerr
Matterns Erben (heirs of Mattern)
Wolf Stegner
Wilhelm Wagner
Based on collateral information, it appears that the two Swiss Auswanderer likely both belonged to the family of Theodor Knerr, whose presumed mother Christina is recorded in Pirmasens and died in Winzeln 26 May 1674, over 70 years old. Although Mattern is also a Swiss name, significantly less is known about the Mattern group on this list because the head of household had died prior to the church census of 1657.
Most accounts hold that 1657 marked the year Theodor Knerr settled in the Amts Lemberg, though it seems more probable that he settled there in 1656, having resided in Kandel previously. According to Walter Siegl’s chronology of the city of Pirmasens after the Thirty Years’ War, a note appears in the Schatzungsregister (Royal Registry) in 1662 describing Durs Knörr’s admission as a royal subject:
Thorreß Kneer, gebürig aus Weneckhofen in der Schweiz, wurde als neuer Unterthan mit zweijährigen Freiheit im Amt aufgenommen.
Thorreß Kneer [Durs Knörr], born in Weneckhofen [sic: Nennigkofen] in Switzerland, has been accepted as a resident with two years’ permission in the district.
This reference is significant on multiple levels, most noticeably in that it includes an early phonetic spelling of Durs [Thorreß] and indicates a probable place of birth, Weneck- or Neneckhofen, most likely referring to Nennigkofen, Lüsslingen in Canton Solothurn, Schweiz. This helps confirm beyond a reasonable doubt that Knerr had not established permanent residency in Westpfalz prior to 1662.
Baptismal records from Protestant parishes in the Pfalz indicate that Knerr came to Pirmasens from the district of Kandel, Kurpfalz, where he and a select number of Knerrs appear in parish’s church records from the 1650s.
It is unclear how many children accompanied Theodor Knerr to Winzeln around 1656, but it is known that his primary spouse was named Agnes, and by that date they had born to them at least four sons:
Johann Nikolaus Knerr, b. 1650
Johannes Knerr, b. 1653
Hanß Michel Knerr, b. 1655
Hanß Henrich Knerr, b. abt 1656
Records relating to these four sons can be found in the Protestant parishes around the District of Lemberg [Pirmasens, Lemberg, etc.] and Pfalz-Zweibrücken, where the oldest two sons settled. There are many trees available online that suggest Knerr had had more children than this, but those trees also assume (likely erroneously) that Knerr and Agnes were wed before 1650 or that Knerr had been married to an unverified spouse before Agnes. In any situation, the first child who can be verified as a legitimate son is Nikolaus, born about 1650.
Nikolaus Knerr, the founder of the Walshausen (Schultheißerei Nünschweiler) lineage of Knerrs, appears to have established residence in Walshausen or nearby by at least 1670, around when he married Elisabetha Schwartz, then only 13 or 14 years old. Elisabetha Schwartz, daughter of the laborer Hanß Nickel Schwartz and Margaretha Wagner, belonged to one of the few families who resided in the Schultheißerei Nünschweiler before the Thirty Years’ War and survived it, either through temporary relocation or other means. A baptism for Elisabetha Schwartz appears in the Reformed Church books of Zweibrücken, indicating that she was born at her parents’ property in Großsteinhausen and baptized 15 Mar 1657. Her father, sometimes recorded in the church and tax records simply as Hanß Schwartz, was an heir and son of Nickel and Agnes Schwartz of Wattweiler and had come to Großsteinhausen to work as a farm-hand for Hanß [Paul or Christoph] Grawel, to whom Margaretha Wagner was originally married. After Grawel died, Margaretha married her farm-hand Nickel Schwartz and presumably continued to reside on the property. It is believed that Nikolaus Knerr and Elisabetha Schwartz were married either at Hornbach or Großsteinhausen around 1670.
The Protestant Church of Pirmasens states that Theodor Knerr died the day of his son’s wedding, 24 Feb 1688, and was estimated to have been about 70 years old. The son whose wedding unfortunately coincided with his father’s death appears to have been Johann Daniel Knerr, who married Anna Margaretha Laub, daughter of Hans Laub, also on February 24. At the time of his death, Theodor Knerr had at least seven surviving male heirs in the vicinity of Pirmasens and Zweibrücken. His widow, Agnes, survived him nearly 20 years, passing away in Winzeln on 7 September 1708, estimated to have been about 78 years old.
Of the children born to this couple, those who appear to have been born in Winzeln or nearby are as follows:
Johann Daniel Knerr, b. abt 1658 in Winzeln, d. aft 1719
Eberhard Gabriel Knerr, b. abt 1660 in Winzeln, d. 25 Dec 1721 in Winzeln
Georg Diebold Knerr, b. 17 Mar (?) 1669 in Winzeln, d. after 1698
Johann Adam Knerr, b. ?, d. 12 Oct 1723 in Pirmasens (some have listed Adam as a twin of Georg Deibold, but the church originals do not seem to indicate this)
Hanß Caspar Knerr, b. abt. 14 Sep 1671 in Winzeln, d. 23 July 1677
Anna Margaretha Knerr, b. abt. 25 Oct 1674 in Winzeln, d. 1675?
This brings the total of known confirmed children to 10. Some family researchers online have suggested, in connecting him to a group of Knörrs from Nennigkofen, that he had several children born throughout the 1640s in Switzerland. I am here to say, in this multi-part article, that we should not take that information as fact! While there may yet be a scenario in which the 3-4 additional children turn out to have been the children of Theodor, the current data doesn’t line up with what we know about his spouse, Agnes and his timeline in the German territories.
Since at least the publication of Laurence E. Knarr’s book on the Knerr/Knarr family (referenced in part I of this article), most researchers have connected Theodor Knerr to the family of Hans Knörr and Christina Stuber, in part because of a reference to a Christina Knör who died in Winzeln in the 1670s. With this information in mind, a Durs Knörr of Nennigkofen, suggested to be their child, was linked, and not much has been worked out since.
While it’s always exciting to trace an emigrant ancestor to their place of origin, a careful genealogist must always go back to exhaustive research as the gold standard, and part of that standard means questioning our own assumptions, even if it was one of those assumptions that got us interested in the mystery in the first place!
As such, my research on Theodor Knerr works backward from his death and burial in the Pirmasens area because that data is the most plentiful and consistent. The problem I want to highlight here is that the evidence most researchers have emphasized in connecting Theodor Knerr to Nennigkofen is through a burial record listed in the earliest Pirmasens Protestant register after the 30 Years’ War ended, this burial describing a “70 or so”-year old woman named Christina Knör in Winzeln.
While any early reference to the Knörr group in Pirmasens is vital, this particular record, located on a faded and partially torn page, has its share of problem spots, the first of which is that the stated relation to Theodor is unclear. In German, the record reads as follows:
[1674] den 6. April wurd alhier begraben Christina [text faded]
[weil.]? Theodori Knören zu Wintzeln Wittib [faded or watered], ihres alters uhngefähr [sic] bey 70. jahren [text faded]
Heim leiyenpredigt von der Erben V. freudern begehat[?].
To translate, the text reads that “On the 6th of April a burial was had for Christina, widow of the deceased Theodor Knör of Winzeln, her age estimated at about 70 years. A sermon was preached by the friends of the deceased at the home.”
This will probably come as a shock to most Knerr researchers, but the text of this burial, the original of which I assume few researchers have had access to over the past 30 years, suggests an entirely different and unconfirmed familial link to Theodor Knerr/Knörr of Winzeln. This is just one reason why detailed primary-document analysis is so important! While it is possible that the family relation listed in burial record is itself an error, we should not be quick to assume that it must be. Cherry-picking data and ignoring conflicts leads to flimsy conclusions, and here, there is almost a suggestion that there was not one but two Theodor Knerrs, possibly father and son, living in Winzeln.
Beyond interest in my own early ancestry, part of what led me to crack this case open again was that the data connecting Durs Knörr/Theodor Knerr of Winzeln to Christina Stuber was tenuous at best. Whenever Auswanderer left their home parishes for other kingdoms, as did the Swiss who settled in Pirmasens during the 1600s, accurate vital records were hard to come by, as vital information had to be relayed by the individuals to their new pastors, and in some instances, the relaying of said info may not have occurred until that individual’s death, as appears to have happened with the woman listed as “Christina, Theodori Knören zu Wintzeln Wittib.”
Just going off of ages listed in the burials of our main Theodor Knerr and this Christina, we find that Theodor was estimated to have been born sometime around 1618, and Christina would have been born sometime around or before 1604 (if we take the burial entries at their word). If the ages are anywhere near correct, this places Christina at a fairly young age when she could presumably have given birth to Theodor.
Records held by the Swiss Reformed parish of Oberwil, near where Nennigkofen is located, have not been terribly illuminating on the matter. As mentioned before, the mere suggestion that a Christina was the mother of Theodor had led many past researchers to conclude that she was Christina Stuber, wife of Han Knörr of Nennigkofen. The issue one encounters in chasing this possible lead is that the parish of Lüsslingen shows this Christina Stuber as already married to Knörr and giving birth to children by 1612, as indicated by the baptism of a child, Anna, on 23 Feb 1612.
I have seen major underestimations of age and other discrepancies of birth in old German records before, but what strikes me as problematic here is that Christina Knörr of Winzeln, if she was indeed the same woman as Christina Stuber, would have been at least 15-20 years older than estimated by the Protestant Parish of Pirmasens. That’s an enormous difference! The takeaway: while this information does not officially rule out a direct paternal relationship between Christina and Theodor of Winzeln, it raises serious concerns as to whether they are also Christina Stuber and Durs Knörr (b. 1615) of Oberwil parish, Canton Solothurn.
All this considered, there still remains a strong possibility that Christina Knörr was indeed Theodor’s mother, but the few references to both individuals in the Pirmasens church registers does not clarify the matter. The missing key in further verifying this family’s relationship is a non-parochial record (likely a government document) that indicates Christina’s relationship to Theodor, and thus far, my research has not unearthed much more than the one Siegl referred to many years ago.
Stay tuned for the next installment of this article, where I will explore Theodor and Agnes’s marriage, the context of Theodor’s emigration from Switzerland, as well as potential Nennigkofen lineages to which he may have belonged!
Strike Up the Music: Snyder Hill and the History of Groundhog Day
When you think of Groundhog Day, it’s hard not to feel a bit delighted by the playfulness and kitsch of the day’s festivities: the polka, top hats, and all the oompa-pomp the borough of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania can bring out for that “Seer of seers, Prognosticator of Prognosticators, and Weather Prophet Extraordinaire,” Punxsutawney Phil, who is surely America’s favorite marmot.
Or if you’re like me, you immediately think of Harold Ramis’s existential do-over classic starring Bill Murray, and what delights and horrors the next round of Sonny and Cher might herald. Fate, folklore, and the need for late-winter fun have made the Groundhog Day celebration the honest-to-God American tradition that it is today, no doubt, but what about the pioneers who brought the tradition to Punxsutawney? By this, I mean the Germans who came to the area, bringing with them the Christian tradition of Candlemas and the woodsy sensibility that led to them trading the traditional hedgehog (or bear, or badger) for a Pennsylvania groundhog in “keeping up with the weather.”
If you look in the annals of Jefferson County, Pennsylvania, where Punxsutawney sits amid hills and forest along the Mahoning, you won’t find much about the German emigrant families who supposedly inspired the Anglo town leaders to make Groundhog Day Punxsutawney’s cultural mark. Whereas Phil’s handlers, i. e. the men in top hats (lovingly dubbed Punxsutawney Phil’s Inner Circle), are named and well-remembered going back to the 1880s, the origins of the holiday, and more so the people for whom it was heritage, don’t often feature much in the town narrative. Among these folks were my own emigrant ancestors, and their narrative, as much as Punxsutawney’s, I consider to be part of my own.
In the spirit of discovery and wanting to learn more about their lives and community, I recently traveled to Punxsutawney for a half-week stay, and while I can’t say that I unraveled the inner secrets of Groundhog Day, I came away with a richer understanding of what life was like for my German-speaking ancestors who were among the first of their group to settle near the borough in the 1830s.
Some of the more detailed histories one will find on Groundhog Day refer to Snyder Hill, a large tract of farm land just south of the borough, as an early site of Groundhog Day celebrations. The official Gobbler’s Knob, the go-to place for the annual celebration, stands right by, though it is important to note that the Knob (a high hill) chosen as the site for festivities has changed several times over the years. Groundhog Day aside, I have long been interested in references to Snyder Hill, as its settlement and history are braided with my own family’s story in the region.
The land is named so for two Pfälzer emigrant brothers, Valentin and Adam Schneider, often recorded (anglicized) as Snyder, whose settlement on the hill was a favorite meeting place for their German friends and neighbors. Because the brothers were cabbage growers, or perhaps just due to their prominence as members of the German community, their settlement was referred to locally as “Sauerkraut Hill.” By the late 1800s, everything from holiday gatherings and dances to meetings of Civil War veterans were held near their home.
At one point, the local papers even went so far as to admonish Valentin Schneider for allowing the building of an outdoor dance floor for youths on his property, complaining that “the woods is not a proper place for holding dances, and we are surprised that Mr. Snyder [sic] should give them permission to erect a platform on his lands.” It should come as a great irony that 132 years since that note was published, anywhere from 20 to 30,000 party-goers now yearly descend on Punxsy, not far from the same land, to keep up the tradition of Groundhog Day!
Despite the significance of the farm, in the official late-1800s histories of Jefferson County by William J. McKnight and Kate M. Scott, the only references to the Schneiders are first to Valentin’s Civil War service with the 74th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, and second to Valentin’s son-in-law, James Dowling Anthony, who with his wife would take over the main Schneider property after Valentin’s death.
Valentin and Adam Schneider of Herschberg
The Schneider brothers and my Schmitt ancestors, who lived directly north of the borough, had associated with one another since the Schneiders arrived in this nation in the 1850s. To what was a mostly English- and Scots-Irish descended borough, with some older German-American families in the mix, I am certain that these emigrant Germans who settled on the outskirts of town were paid no mind in their first decade as residents, as they tended to stick to their own, especially on arrival. To illustrate, the land on which the Schneider brothers purchased their farms near what was referred to as “The Hoeh Settlement,” a communal series of farms directly to the east of Snyder Hill, owned by their cousins.
You will not find “the Hoeh Settlement” on a current map, but the truth of the matter is that the Hoehs, originally spelled Höh, were close family of the Schneider brothers who preceded them in coming to America, settling the land beginning around 1848-1850. Valentin and Adam Schneider both married members of the Hoeh family, Valentin marrying Anna Ottilia Hoeh (1834-1903) around 1854 and Adam marrying Ottilia’s niece, Katharina Hoeh (1842-1909) around 1866. The points of relation here are complicated and will be explored later, so stay tuned!
They immediately found a community in the local German Reformed Church (what is now St. Peter’s UCC of Punxsutawney), and when I say community, I mean a congregation composed almost entirely of their family members and former countrymen from the Pfalz.
Pfalz-Zweibrücken in the 1870s
The Hoeh and Schneider families were a large and heavily intermarried group from the town of Herschberg, Pfalz, Bavaria, which lies in the Sickinger Höhe (Sickinger Heights) north of the city of Pirmasens. The Schmitts, Spraus, Webers, Haags, and Conrads, the founders of the Punxsutawney Reformed Church who arrived in Punxsutawney in the 1830s, were from another grouping of towns just a few kilometers south of Herschberg, known as the parish of Nünschweiler. Although the Schneider brothers (and one more brother, who later settled in New York) were strangers to this country in the 1850s, it is hard to believe that they were unfamiliar to the neighbors and church goers who would become their community in the New World.
In the years after their settlement, the Schneiders became in-laws of our in-laws, and the brothers, being civically minded men, engrossed themselves in local affairs as they settled into their new home. The older of the two, Valentin, served during the Civil War and would frequently host veterans’ meetings at or near his home. At the time the Schneiders passed away, long and elegiac obituaries and remembrances were published in local papers, recalling fondly the friends the Schneiders were to so many.
Given how beloved the brothers were, it will come as a surprise to know how little of local history actually touched on the brothers’ lives or their community. Part of it, I would argue, is due to cultural separatism, and by that I mean the tendency of post-1820 German emigrants to set up their own German-language communities among extended family and former neighbors, where they could continue their cultural practices.
In the Civil War history Damn Dutch: Pennsylvania Germans at the Battle of Gettysburg, historians Christian Keller and David L. Valuska do an excellent job clarifying the cultural and political circumstances that set post-1820 German emigrants apart from the other, earlier German settlers we sometimes generally refer to as Pennsylvania Dutch. Although the true “PA Dutch” and the Germans of the 1830s actually shared cultural roots in southwestern Germany, including a common dialect in the case of those from the Pfalz, the “Dutch” departed the Germanic kingdoms mostly in the 1700s. The difference in political identity between two groups, separated by 130 years, can be fairly astounding, as Keller and Valuska demonstrate.
As one can imagine, the motivations for emigrating were meaningfully different. German emigrants to the Americas in the 1700s were largely from minority Protestant families (many the descendants of Swiss religious refugees and dissenters who came to Germany in the 1600s) and were not in a position to hold stature or wealth in their former communities. By and large, they came to America to build church-centered communities that would enable them just the power to govern those communities without being beholden to a king, duke, or other denomination or faith. These families, also by consequence of having emigrated from region to region while in Europe, were also much poorer than those who came to the United States after the Napoleonic Wars ended.
On the other hand, families like the Schneiders and Hoehs left the Germanic states at a time when the idea of liberalism had twice brought nearly the entirety of what is now Germany to the brink of revolution. They were a people who, having experienced constant warfare and an increasing cost of living, had grown tired of living in monarchies that ignored the wants of the people. The key here is to remember that the left-leaning political identity many, say, in the Pfalz shared, was as important a marker of identity to them as religious sovereignty was to the “Palatines” of the 1700s.
It is no accident, for example, that Snyder Hill is best remembered for the school house erected on the property, which served as the main source of education for many of the young, of means or not, around the borough. In Luthersburg, PA, just to the east, fellow emigrants from Pirmasens in the Pfalz also founded free schools of their own, seeing the school system as key to maintaining the desire for liberty that drove them from what was then the Kingdom of Bavaria, the Pfalz (quite distant from mainland Bavaria) having been ruled remotely by that kingdom as an electorate. Many young men from the southwestern Pfalz, it should be noted, also fled the country in 1832, 1833, and again in 1848 and 1849 to avoid arrest, conscription, or worse during those revolutionary times.
In the United States, families like the Schneiders, Hoehs, and my own were able, however meagerly, to shape their own destinies without the burden of inherited residential or property rights obstructing the path forward. In the Pfalz, for example, one could not simply move from town to town but rather had to have a reason for establishing residence, such as marriage or employment, and even still would need to have other qualifications to obtain the full rights native residents might have, such as the ability to sell goods, vote in communal matters, or hold local office. For this reason, young men whose parents died young or left them without property or provisions often chose to take a gamble on a new nation rather than condemn themselves to inescapable poverty in towns perhaps not a mile from their birthplace. America’s example of a self-governed nation, inspired by the same French liberalism that triggered the German revolutions of the 1830s and 40s, only grew in appeal to the disenfranchised Germans.
During a time of short-lived peace for the Pfalz, Valentin Schneider was born in Herschberg bei Pirmasens, Pfalz, Bavaria on 22 January 1826 to parents Jacob Schneider and Elisabetha Höh. He was baptized February 15 at the Protestant (Lutheran) parish of Herschberg, where his relatives had worshipped for over a century. It can be inferred from other records that his full Christian name was Johann Valentin Schneider. His baptismal sponsors included Adam Hofmann of nearby Krähenberg, Jacob Kiefer, as well as Valentin Höh, with Elisabetha Höh, and Elisabetha Kettenring, all of Herschberg.
The Höh family ranks among the oldest of this parish, their presence in the region dating back to the 1600s and potentially before. As such, the intersections between the Höh tree and the Schneiders are too intermingled to explain in one short article. One interesting example I could cite is that the man identified as Schneider’s sponsor and presumable namesake is most likely Johann Valentin Höh, husband of Elisabetha Scheffe, the pioneers of the Punxsutawney Hoeh Settlement, and perhaps more importantly the parents of the woman who would become Valentin Schneider’s wife in America. Imagine a parent-in-law who remembers your own birth! Granted, the Hoehs and Schneiders were “kissing cousins” (as was common in such small towns) as we say stateside, but the relevance of this to the shared family history in America can’t be overstated.
Schneider’s much younger brother Adam, who would also journey to America and settle in Punxsutawney, was born sixteen years later on 26 May 1842, baptized on June 12 in the same church. This time, the sponsors included the children of the previously mentioned Hoeh family, who, you guessed it, would also become siblings-in-law to Adam Schneider. Among these sponsors, I find a young man who is most likely my own 3rd great-uncle Valentin Höh the younger (son of Valentin and Elisabetha), who would marry my aunt Louisa Schmitt around 1858, described in the record as “Valentin Höh, eheliche led. Sohn von Valentin Höh d. J., Ackersmann,” which translates to Valentin Höh, single, legitimate son of Valentin Höh the younger. If you’re not confused yet, wait until the next sponsor, who is “Katharina Höh, daughter of Valentin Höh the elder.”
One qualification must be made here, which is that it is difficult to be 100% certain about which Höh family members are referred to in this record, as there were multiple family members (some more closely related than others) all by the same name, Valentin, Adam, and Katharina being the most common in the Höh family.
Here I am compelled to explain what can be a very confusing German practice (for an American perspective): the suffixes “senior” (die Ältëre) and “junior” (die Jüngere), and even “der Dritte” (the III) were almost always relative and not signs of a straight line of descent. Meaning, if you were named Valentin and there were two older Valentins by the same surname in your town, you would likely be deemed Valentin III whether you were related to the others or not. Put simply, if there were two men with the same name recorded in a village, one would be “the elder,” and the other would be “the younger,” so long as they were still living. If one died, and the other survived, and yet another was born, the surviving younger would become “the elder,” the new child would be referred to in record as “the younger.” It just so happened that in forming the Hoeh Settlement, at least three Valentin Hoehs and three Adam Hoehs (potentially more) all at one time resided just east of Snyder Hill in what became Bell Township. And the monikers stuck, too!
One will see in surviving photos of the Punxsutawney German Reformed Cemetery (removed after 1922) engravings still describing the Adams and Valentins according to this system, an issue that perplexed generations of researchers. Because the Höh family intermarried with their own cousins, including the Schneiders, the overlapping names can be merely puzzling on a good day.
While this may sound like family-tree Sudoku, actually solving the puzzle proved instrumental in understanding some lesser-known dimensions of the Hoeh and Schneider families’ roles in the history of the Punxsutawney area.
The Hoeh Settlement in Bell Township
The history of the Hoeh (pronounced ‘Hay’) Family Settlement in Bell Township, to my knowledge, has never been formally explored in print, but I will attempt to summarize here what I have gathered over the past ten years. Höh is the more traditional spelling, but American members of the family are recorded under Hoeh—an acceptable spelling that is essentially unchanged, as ö is often spelled out ‘oe’ with surnames in German.
The first Hoehs to arrive in Jefferson County were apparently not the Johann Valentin Höh group but rather that of his brother, Johann Adam Höh, born 4 Oct 1793 in Herschberg, Pfalz, Bavaria. Both men were the sons of Johann Adam Höh and Maria Margaretha Woll, also of that parish.While residing in Herschberg, Adam Höh, the older brother, was married to Elisabetha Schäfer (b. 1794), a daughter of Valentin Schäfer of Herschberg, on 30 Mar 1814. To confuse matters, Valentin Höh (1797-1877), the brother, married a woman by the name of Elisabetha Scheffe, Scheffe being a variant spelling of Schäfer. In fact, it is highly likely that the two women by the same name, married to brothers, were 1st cousins.According to parish records, Adam Höh and Elisabetha Schäfer (both Protestant) had at least six children while still in Herschberg, those being
1. Johann Adam Höh, b. Jan 1815
2. Johann Jacob Höh, b. 25 Oct 1816
3. Valentin Höh, b. Jan 1821
4. Peter Höh, b. 9 Apr 1823
5. Johann Michael Höh, b. 18 Apr 1825
6. Georg Höh, b. 30 Sep 1827
7. Elisabetha Höh, b. Mar 1830
The family appears to have emigrated to the United States around 1831 or 1832 at latest, having settled in Pennsylvania by 1833 when their next child, Margaretha E. Höh, is estimated to have been born. They had one more child, a son named Friedrich Höh, born about 1835. It is unclear when exactly the family settled in Jefferson County, as the father (and later his sons) appears to have become a tobacconist and cigar seller and may have established shop in Pittsburgh by 1847 (according to a directory for that year), although this may have been a business created by his eldest son, likely in cooperation with his father. By 1850, the family had established residence in greater Punxsutawney near the farm of Dr. William Altman. The Altman and Burley families of this area have definite associations with the Hoeh group in later generations, making it likely that the families knew each other fairly well.
On 16 May 1850, Adam Höh Sr.’s brother, the aforementioned Johann Valentin Höh, arrived in New York City aboard the Ship Minnesota (from Liverpool, en route likely from a German or French port) along with a majority of his family as well as several other individuals from Herschberg. This Höh family, for whom the Hoeh Settlement is best known, evidently relocated to Punxsutawney soon enough to have been counted as residents in the 1850 Federal Census for Jefferson County when it was enumerated 2 Aug 1850.
Aboard the Ship Minnesota were Valentin, age 52, his wife Elisabetha (Scheffe), age 40, Elisabetha’s parents Adam Scheffe, age 77, and Eva (Wien), age 68, and a few of their children, including daughter Katharina, age 28, with husband Adam Höh, age 36 (a cousin of the Höh and Schneider families), and their son Adam Höh, age 8; other children of Valentin and Elisabetha aboard were sons Valentin (age 20) and Jacob (age 9), and daughters Ottilia (age 16), Anna Maria (age 13), and Margaretha (age 20), listed as Müller, indicating that she was likely married or widowed at the time of emigration. Margaretha, notably, was later the wife of Peter Weber and mother of prominent Punxsutawney figure John A. Weber, a local businessman, gentleman’s clothier, and philanthropist whose name is still well known in the borough today.
Interestingly, a few members of the family are absent from the list, including the eldest daughter Elisabetha Höh (b. 1818) and son Adam Höh (b. 1826), who both settled with their parents. Adam Höh’s absence is particularly odd, seeing as he settled with his family in Punxsutawney by 1850, which suggests that he was either mistakenly left off the list or that he emigrated beforehand. Eva, another daughter who was married before 1850, did not emigrate with her family and instead remained in Herschberg all her life.
Elisabetha Höh, at the time her family emigrated to the United States, was already married and had several young children and so delayed her emigration. She was wed 16 Sep 1837 to Valentin Höh (b. 1812), a 1st cousin, and while living in Herschberg they had several daughters, only three of whom were recorded as arriving with them when they docked at New York aboard the Ship William Tell on 22 June 1852, the others presumably having died in infancy. Also aboard this ship were an Ottilia Höh (age 46) and Elisa. Höh (age 20), listed directly ahead of the Valentin Höh family, as well as a member of the Thom family, also of Herschberg. It is likely that others of Herschberg were aboard this ship, but I have not yet identified all potential passengers.
To summarize, the full family of Johann Valentin Höh and Elisabetha Scheffe, primary residents of the Hoeh Settlement in what became Bell Township, Jefferson County, were as follows (all born and baptized in Herschberg):Johann Valentin Höh, b. 15 July 1797, m. 26 Mar 1816 to Elisabetha Scheffe (b. 23 Apr 1797 to Johann Adam Scheffe and Eva Margaretha Wien) Children:
1. Elisabetha Höh, b. 4 Nov 1818, m. Valentin Höh III (b. 1812)
2. Katharina Köh, b. 19 Mar 1822, m. Johann Adam Höh (b. 1814)
3. Eva Höh, b. 24 July 1824, m. Michael Höh (b. 1824), did not emigrate
4. Adam Höh, b. 3 Mar 1826, m. Caroline Smouse (b. 1834)
5. Valentin Höh, b. 21 Mar 1829, m. Louisa Schmitt (Smith in English) (b. 22 May 1839)
6. Margaretha Höh, b. 25 Oct 1831, m. unknown Müller, m. 2nd Peter Weber (b. 1826 in Gersbach, Pirmasens, Pfalz, Bavaria)
7. Anna Ottilia Höh, b. 15 June 1834, m. Valentin Schneider, subject of this article
8. Anna Maria Höh, b. 2 May 1837, m. Heinrich Kuntz (b. 19 Jan 1834 in Lemberg, Pirmasens, Pfalz, Bavaria)
9. Johann Jacob Höh, b. 14 Feb 1841, m. 1st Rachel Barnett, m. 2nd Margaretha Veit (b. 1851), m. 3rd Elisabetha “Lizetta” Kieffer (b. in Herschberg)
While the majority of this family remained in Punxsutawney, the first Höh group belonging to Valentin Höh’s brother Adam permanently removed to Pittsburgh in the 1850s, where it appears the father and his sons continued their cigar business, later called J. M. Hoeh & Sons (Cigars and Tobacco), at 169 5th St., headed by son Johann Michael Höh. It is presumed based on residential records that Adam and wife Elisabetha died between 1861 and 1870.
As one will notice in the Höh tree, there were a lot of intermarriages between related families and other residents of the Pirmasens area of the Pfalz. Valentin Höh the younger (b. 1829), who would inherit most of the Hoeh Settlement property, was the husband of my 3rd-great aunt, Louisa, daughter of Jakob Schmitt (1810-1877) and wife Maria Katharina Baas (1803-1895), pioneers of Battle Hollow in Young Township, Jefferson County. The Schmitts were natives of Nünschweiler, south of Herschberg, and the Baas family was from Winzeln, a satellite town of the city of Pirmasens.
As noted before, the founding members of the Punxsutawney Reformed Church were the Schmitts, who along with their relatives in the Sprau, Weber, Lott, and Wingert families, as well as the emigrant families of Christian and Nikolaus Haag, brothers from Windsberg, Nünschweiler parish, the Heilbrunns of Gersbach parish, and Dr. Georg Michael Kurz (known as Kurtz), were the earliest parishioners. They were joined by a few local German-speaking Protestant families like the Dornmeyer (later Dunmire) family and the Adam Lang (later Long) family, who were intermarried, but the majority of the church hailed from the southwestern Pfalz (in the counties of Zweibrücken and Pirmasens) and were related.
These families were joined by other emigrants from Pfalz-Zweibrücken and Pirmasens like the Conrad, Weiß, Kuntz, Höh, Schneider, and Zimmermanns between 1840 and 1855. Also joining the parish were a few Lutheran families from the Kingdom of Saxony, though many of these families broke off the union with the Reformed church and formed their own congregation, the Martin Luther Church of Punxsutawney.
The Church and Its Cemetery
The German Reformed Church of Punxsutawney, founded in 1838, is where the Schneider brothers found both their religious home as well as their future wives, making it a vital part of their German-language community.
For most of the 1800s, the German-speaking congregation of the German Reformed Church of Punxsutawney remained mostly composed of the family members and in-laws of the pioneer members, who were nearly all German-born, though a few residents who lived nearby the church were known to worship with them. As the more Americanized generations of these families began to separate from the congregation, attendance diminished to the point that the church was nearly shuttered in the 1890s.
So rooted was the church in its German traditions that by the 1880s, membership had been reduced to only a few hearty souls, mainly the surviving elderly pioneers who presumably preferred German services. The Schneider brothers, then getting on years, were among the remaining few.
According to various documents, it was Adam Schneider himself, a deacon and one of the most ardent and long-standing members of the congregation, who is credited with saving the congregation. Supposedly, Schneider, having been elected as delegate to the classis, delivered an impassioned argument to the officials of the classis and succeeded in convincing them to keep the church open long enough for a resuscitation effort.
The effort, mainly led by Reformed minister Rev. U. O. H. Kirchner and the Board of Trustees (at the time under Smith, Weber, and Wingert, all cousins), led to a massive growth in attendance but ironically so over-expanded the church, mostly with local families unrelated to the pioneers, that it was forced to build a new church in 1922. The building of the church necessitated the removal of the cemetery—one of the oldest in the borough of Punxsutawney, with burials dating to the 1850s and likely before—which created a great deal of chaos and controversy. Originally, the graves in the way of the new building were to relocated to other cemeteries, the deceased reinterred at each family’s expense, but a large number of the pioneer descendants were so upset that they filed suit against the church in an attempt to stop the cemetery destruction.
The suit failed, but an agreement with Rev. Dietrich, according to a document in the pastor’s hand, was reached in which the majority of the cemetery was to simply be reburied alongside the new building, the stones turned into the ground as a foundation for the new church, and a permanent marker erected. The church, however, failed to erect any kind of memorial, and poor handling of the graves during the removal, which happened over the course of many years, led to a tremendous loss of records. It is also likely that many graves had already been destroyed by age, weather, or even earlier removals when the stones were first shuffled alongside the new building structure.
The majority of the 100-something burials in the cemetery belonged to the Smiths, Spraus, Hoehs, Webers, Wingerts, and their relatives, and one of the graves removed and permanently lost belonged to Valentin Schneider, who was among the last ten burials in the cemetery while it was still in use.
While this is not the main point of this article, it is of historical importance to consider that Valentin Schneider, namesake of Snyder Hill, one of Punxsutawney’s most famous monuments, probably remains buried in an unmarked plot between the parking lot and the current yellow-brick building. Adam Schneider, his younger brother, died the very year construction began and the cemetery was to be removed. The fact that no further monument was erected for Valentin or his wife Ottilia shows that their children were probably among the protestors during the debate over the cemetery removal. Adam Schneider, whose name can be seen on a stained-glass window erected in his honor in the new building, was buried in Circle Hill cemetery, as were many of the parishioners who died after 1908.
The Schneider Brothers in America
According to his petition for naturalization, Valentin Schneider arrived in the United States at the port of New York City around March 1850. While a passenger list matching this data for arrival in New York has not been located, a Bavarian Pfalz state newspaper identified that a Valentin Schneider of Langwieden, a few kilometers north of Herwschberg, was cleared by the government to legally emigrate to America around Feb 1850. Given that Valentin’s grandfather Walther Schneider was a resident of Langwieden, it is most likely that this record refers to Valentin Schneider, later of Punxsutawney.
After establishing residence in Young Township, he filed a petition for naturalization in Jefferson County on 14 August 1854 and was was sponsored by Adam Höh, although which of the three Adam Höhs is unclear. It is also unclear when exactly Valentin first established residence in Young Township, however, as he seems to have been itinerant during his first years here. C
onflicting information about the date of his arrival in America and subsequent marriage to Ottilia Hoeh suggests that he most likely did not arrive in Punxsutawney until 1854, and on establishing residence immediately petitioned for citizenship. His obituary states that he was married to Hoeh “4 years after his arrival,” but the obituary erroneously gives 1855 as the year of arrival. On the 1900 census, he stated that he arrived in 1850 and married in 1854. Given this information, the most logical explanation is that he arrived in Punxsutawney in 1854 and either married Ottilia Hoeh then or closer to 1857, before their first-known child’s birth. Valentin and wife Ottilia appear as a married couple 11 April 1857 in one of the earliest lists of communicant members of the Punxsutawney German Reformed Church, indicating that they had wed by that date.
It is likely that Schneider made his first home with his relatives the Hoehs at their property near the top of the former Indiana Hill. Thanks to a keenly detailed article in Punxsutawney Hometown by local historian S. Thomas Curry, the history of “the hill” can be clarified somewhat. According to Curry, it was the Cory (later Corey) family who first settled the highest hill at the southeast end of the borough, an “elevated ‘knob’ of woodland” that granted an uncontested view of the area. Corey’s Round Top, as it was also known, was the site of many family farms around what is now Woodland Ave., and on the eastern-most end, right on the other side of the township line, was the Hoeh Settlement. To its immediate west is where Valentin Schneider would purchase his first farm, an 82+ acre tract, from Jacob Burley, the deed dated 2 Apr 1864 but entered 13 May 1867. It is important to note here that Schneider resided in the borough of Punxsutawney for the better part of a decade before purchasing his storied farm atop the hill. Curry, having acquired details from Adam Schneider’s granddaughter, learned that Adam Schneider supposedly was the one who cleared and built the road which is now Woodland Ave. Extension as an access road to his farm.
Between 1854 and 1864, Valentin Schneider worked as a cabinet and furniture maker, setting up shop in the John R. Pantall building. He and Ottilia made their first home near German emigrants Christian and Margaretha Müller, parents of Christian Miller, who would become a prominent Punxsutawney figure himself. The Müllers were emigrants from Rhenish Prussia, the father a tailor professionally, and though Lutheran in faith worshiped with the German Reformed Church of Punxsutawney for many years, later becoming early members of the Martin Luther Church after its formation.In the year following his death, a friend and old-timer of Punxsutawney published in the Punxsutawney News a multi-part history of the borough in which a rather poignant remembrance of Schneider was recorded, adding greater detail to this record:
. . . Mentioning the old landmarks recalls to mind my old friend Valentine Snyder. In his own language he was one of the most intelligent men of all the pioneers of this county. He was a remarkably bright man and his descriptive powers were fine. He lived where the John R. Pantall building now stands in a two-story frame building and had his cabinet shop on the back portion of the lot. He was a brother of our townsman Adam Snyder, comrade Valentine Snyder having died last summer. He was a veteran of the war of the rebellion and was nearly 80 years old when he died. His cabinet shop was destroyed by fire, shortly after which he and his family moved onto a farm in South Young township where he lived and died. The house he occupied in town was afterwards occupied by Attorney A. J. Monks, who had his office in the same building, and then the office by A. J. Truitt, Esq., until it was replaced by the Brown Hardware Co. and J. M. Beyer’s drug store. Mr. Snyder’s property in Young township is occupied by his son-in-law A. D. Anthony. There is no one I miss more than our old friend Valentine Snyder. – OLD SOX, 22 Feb 1905
While residing in the borough, Valentin and Ottilia celebrated the birth of their first three children, Gustavus (or Augustus) Adolf, Lydia Bertha, and Daniel A. Schneider. Gustavus Schneider, the oldest son, died from consumption 26 Feb 1887 at the age of 29.
On 19 Dec 1864, Valentin was called in the fourth draft of Jefferson County men during the Civil War. No physical description was recorded of him at draft, unfortunately. He reported for duty the following spring at Pittsburgh and mustered in with the 74th Pennsylvania Infantry, Company B on 7 Mar 1865. At that point in the war, the 74th would not see combat and was assigned to guard duty in West Virginia until the end of war, when they were all returned to Pittsburgh from Clarksburg, where they were stationed during that summer. Valentin received an honorable discharge and returned home. It is said in Valentin’s obituary that in 1867 he attempted to relocate to Egg Harbor City, New Jersey but returned within a year, although the full story there is unknown.
Shortly before that, Valentin was joined in America by his much younger brother, Adam. The best estimate is that the younger Schneider arrived in town sometime around 1864 and afterward married Katharina Hoeh in 1865, a daughter of his much older 1st cousin. In 1866 he purchased a 40 acre farm in Bell Township from William McKee. His portion of the hill in Young Township, however, he purchased between 1877 and 1880, beginning with a meager farm of 13 acres acquired from the estate of Dr. Charles Wood, a well-known resident of the knob, on 2 July 1877. He supplemented this land with a further 25-30 acres in small properties purchased from his brother, in-laws, and other locals.
Over the years that followed, the Schneider brothers became prominent vegetable growers, earning their home the moniker “Sauerkraut Hill.” For the uninformed, it is important to remember that Punxsutawney was at the epicenter of one of America’s biggest coal booms in the 19th century, the mining of which began around Battle Hollow, a few miles north of the Schneider Bros. property, around 1882. This rural area, which soon saw the birth of several dozen mining towns, hosted countless miners—many of them newly-arrived emigrants—consequently raising the demand for fresh vegetables and produce. Skilled growers of staple crops had good business dealing to the mining companies, most of which in the beginning were offshoots of the Rochester & Pittsburgh Coal Company—a company more-or-less founded by the purchase of Punxsutawney land.
During the coal years, Valentin and Adam Schneider remained members of the Punxsutawney German Reformed Church, renamed St. Peter’s Reformed & Presbyterian Church in the 1900s, serving as elders and deacons multiple terms.
In the 1890s, following the departure of Rev. J. F. Wiant, the parish was left without a minister who could preach in German, and due to that and other factors, the number of communicant members diminished to well-under 20. Although the congregation struggled by with the help of local English-speaking supply ministers, the classis would have closed the church around 1900, supposedly, had it not been for Adam Schneider’s insistence that the church be preserved. Preaching in the German language was discontinued (a fact the church, by necessity, had to advertise in local papers to convince people to attend), and the Reverends Lewis Reiter and Uriah O. H. Kirchner helped expand membership to over 100 communicant members by 1910.
Valentin Schneider, after a year of health issues as well as an unsuccessful operation, passed away Thursday morning, 15 September 1904, a year after own wife passed away on 21 November 1903. Both were interred at the old cemetery at the Punxsutawney German Reformed church, now defunct—some of the last burials made at that cemetery before its removal. At the time of their deaths, they were survived by their son Daniel Snyder and daughters Lydia (wife of Dowling Anthony) and Hilda (wife of W. H. King). In the German tradition, they dispensed their land by deed rather than will a year before Ottilia passed away, likely sensing due to her health problems that year that it was time to do so.
As mentioned before, graves were erected for them at the churchyard on Graffius Avenue in the Elk Run section alongside what was then the red-brick church. In 1908, an additional government-provided marker for veterans was furnished for Valentin. A photograph of this marker was taken in the 1920s or after during a survey before its removal, although the surveyor failed to photograph either of the couple’s actual grave markers. Supposedly, Ottilia Hoeh Schneider’s marker was one of the few that was still standing beside the church up until the 1960s, as it was transcribed. A majority of the graves were moved beside the church when construction began in September 1922, although it is unclear when or how many grave markers were sodded over between then, the building’s completion in the 1940s, and the cemetery’s final removal in 1960s.
The Legacy
Although Groundhog Day hasn’t always been celebrated at Snyder Hill, it’s interesting to consider that one origin story alleges that inspiration for the holiday was found when several of the leaders of business decided to go on their own “groundhog hunt.” The tradition at the time, rather, for the Germans, was to actually eat the groundhog, and catching them for food was something many of them did for survival in their earliest days (the meat not being a particular delicacy, that is). The businessmen, in going on their little trip for inspiration and kicks, hired a German ‘expert’ to act as their guide to finding a groundhog. When I recreate the event in my mind, the story and its setup remind me a bit of the fan-boat trips tourists have been making for decades out in the Louisiana bayous. Just swap the gators for a groundhog (which has a nasty bite of its own, by the way), and you get the picture.
The Germans around the borough of Punxsutawney were often the feature (and sometimes joke) of 19th-century gossip columns in the papers, and one can infer from the jesting and caricatures in those columns that even in the 1800s the Punxsy natives saw the German ways as having their own quirks. When you think about it, if it was the hunting expedition that triggered the formal, emblematic holiday for the borough, then Groundhog Day has always been its own thing in this country, which is to say, what folks do now to celebrate is about as close as it’s ever been to the ‘real deal,’ except in this version, Phil unknowingly gets a yearly reprieve (much like the Thanksgiving turkey pardon, now a U. S. Federal tradition)!
Knowing that families like my own, the Schneiders, and their compatriots were the nearest rural Germans participating in these kinds of hunts (and were often the explicit subjects of those local report columns in the papers), it’s hard to resist the temptation of thinking our ancestral community had some role to play in what Groundhog Day has become now. While I’m not itching to learn what groundhog tastes like, it’s hard not to love a holiday that brings you closer to your ancestral story, or in the very least helps encourage a love for historical mystery, and along the way elicit some joy from hard times gone past, the kind of joy you can share, and from which you make your own traditions. —
Author’s Note:
Material for this article was drawn from research in Pirmasens-area parishes, local histories, documents and articles from the Punxsutawney Area Historical and Genealogical Society, clippings from Punxsutawney newspapers 1860-1910, and notes from my own personal archive. For a more detailed article on the history of the German community described, please see my article in The Jeffersonian, Vol. I (2014), Brookville, PA.
The Knerr Family and the Thirty Years’ War: Part I
Wars impose a number of obstacles for genealogy: the destruction of records, disappearing lineages, and sudden, almost illogical, changes in residence, to name a few. But what about war as a source of pedigree collapse, a term meaning any instance when your family tree leads back to the same common ancestor on multiple lines? The United States has experienced few wars destructive enough (and urban enough) to cause this, but those with Germanic roots ought to remember that the German states and kingdoms experienced several, most notably the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648).
The Thirty Years’ War, a large-scale conflict between the Catholic and Protestant governments of Europe, was in many regards an apocalyptic event for the worker classes. The most affected were rural inhabitants as well as for those dwelling or seeking refuge in the cities. States caught in the cross-hairs, especially the German territories that now make up the border with France, suffered catastrophic losses. It is said that the Pfalz-Zweibrücken, which boasted a population of well over 5000 in 1609, saw between 70-80% of its population die to warfare, starvation, and disease. Losses in some sections of Württemberg and Baden were comparable, and the devastation of the conflict extended well across what we now know as Germany. Despite efforts to encourage foreign refugees (especially the Protestant Swiss) to settle and repopulate the most affected areas, the devastation of the war and the lowered population endured in the Pfalz until the 18th century.
What does this mean for genealogical research, aside from the usual obstacles? I would argue that in the Pfalz, the most interesting long-term consequence has been pedigree collapse, which leads to a kind of “founder effect”: a lasting loss of variation in the population. In this article, I will look at how one Pfälzer “founder”—Durs “Theodor” Knerr (1618?-1687) of Winzeln, Pirmasens—has shaped even American populations in the 20th century, particularly in the Mid-Atlantic region where many of his first emigrant-descendants settled.
The Knerrs in the Pfalz and America
Postcard Depicting a Scene from the Canton Solothurn, late 1800s
Descendants of this Knerr line can be found across a wide swath of the United States, most of the lineages having stemmed from descendants who emigrated from Pfalz-Zweibrücken between 1830 and 1870. Various branches now spell the name “Knarr,” a phonetic spelling likely intended to emulate the German pronunciation carried over by emigrant descendants.
The Swiss-German Knerr line in the Pfalz came about as a direct result of warfare. Reconstruction in the Pfalz began around 1648 or earlier, toward the end of the Thirty Years’ War, but by the time town rights were reinstated in the Landesamt Zweibrücken in 1657, many towns and villages still had fewer than 4 families. This is especially true for the Schultheißerei Nünschweiler, one of the main farming districts east of the city of Zweibrücken and north of Hornbach. The area has long been known colloquially as Westrich, a geographical designation referring to the plain west of the Pfälzer mountains, extending north to the Sickinger-Höhe and south to Elsaß in France. Zweibrücken and Hornbach are the most historically important settlements of their county, but Nünschweiler and associated towns had long proved vital in providing resources and labor for the region. The Roman Catholic Church in this settlement, according to lore, has stood nearly 1000 years, and the name of Ninivillanus can be found in early Latin annals describing Zweibrücken (Bipontinus). During the parochial visitation of 1609, a religious census of Zweibrücken’s people, the town of Nünschweiler numbered 23 heads-of-family, not counting familial crossover. By the 1657 visitation, that number had been reduced to 3, though essentially 2, as two of the households were immediately related. Nearby Walshausen and Dellfeld respectively hosted about 4-5 families each.
Of the two family groups residing in Nünschweiler, those of Nickel Schmitt and Nickel Glahn the elder, both were residents of the town prior to the Thirty Years’ War. However, only the Schmitts, my paternal ancestors, were actually native to Nünschweiler, as the Glahn (also, Gelan, Glan) family in the district was founded by the Reformed minister and schoolmaster Abraham Gelan (1532-1591) of Erdesbach bei Kusel. Former Nünschweiler residents resettled in other nearby towns in the Schultheißerei, but for the most part, the family groups that survived were interrelated and significantly reduced in number. There have been few studies of the effects of the war on the religious confession of the population, but my research has revealed that the Thirty Years’ War almost decisively shifted the Landesamt Zweibrücken toward Protestantism, the majority of the Catholics having either fled or died during the war.
Take for example the two families I have cited: although the Gelan family contained in its lineage an esteemed number of Protestant ministers dating back to the early Reformation, the town of Nünschweiler itself was presumably a majority Catholic before the war, as most of the families did not appear in any of the existing pre-1657 registers of Reformed or evangelische citizens. The next census in 1663 reveals that the family of Nickel Schmitt was of mixed faith: the father was katholisch and the mother reformiert. The one known surviving son of this family was raised in his mother’s faith, as tradition dictated, and so the Catholic legacy of the town from its prewar days effectively diminished. A cursory survey of the other towns in the Schultheißerei shows that the vast majority of surviving prewar families who were previously Catholic had converted to the Reformed faith, either willfully or as a result of marriage or necessity.
I cite this case as a preamble to my discussion of Durs “Theodor” Knerr because the Knerr family in the Zweibrücken and Pirmasens area was Reformed in faith and Swiss in nationality. Put another way, Theodor Knerr was part of an upswing in a migration trend that definitively changed the local culture.
Regional historians, following the accounts of the Thirty Years’ War, believed that most of the towns in the Landesamt Zweibrücken had been wiped out entirely and burned to the ground by Catholic troops, and that the region was then repopulated by Swiss Reformed refugees and migrants like Theodor Knerr. Though this generally holds true for certain periods, the earliest families to reside in (or resettle) the destroyed villages after 1648 were their former residents, families predominantly related to one another, and can be located in prewar documents, suggesting that the historical accounts may not be fully accurate or complete. It is important to note this because the “founder effect” of the Landesamt Zweibrücken is two-fold: the migrant founders’ lines and the “native” founders’ lines intermarried with increasing frequency beginning in the 1670s, but pedigree collapse in Pfalz-Zweibrücken had been happening as a direct consequence of war and religious conflict for at least the 70 years prior. Whereas we can easily track the postwar Pfalz-Zweibrücken founders, tracking the full extent of prewar pedigree collapse remains elusive.
By the 1800s, the Knerr name had become prominent in Pfalz-Zweibrücken and Pirmasens, its families and allied lines widespread. By the 1850s, the lineage had also journeyed across the Atlantic to the United States, where descendants settled in Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky prior to the American Civil War. It is interesting to note that the the Pfälzer branch of the Knerr family can be traced to a single Swiss progenitor, Theodor Knerr, our subject. The full extent of this line is difficult to determine, but his descendants easily number in the thousands, especially in the United States, where the names Knerr and Knarr have put down roots. Being a direct descendant of Dreißinger-era emigrants (Germans who fled to America in the 1830s) from Pfalz-Zweibrücken, I can reliably trace my own ancestry to Theodor Knerr on two lines, and it may be that my roots are more intertwined with his beyond this. In the western Pennsylvania counties of Clearfield and Jefferson, a significant number of the post-1830 emigrant Bavarians (from Pfalz-Zweibrücken and Pirmasens, primarily) share some tie to the Knerrs through blood or marriage. Because these families were instrumental in the area’s modest Protestant German congregations, intermarriages between already related families continued throughout the 1800s and well into the 1900s.
Theodor Knerr, the Stammvater in question, is believed to have been born around 1618 or earlier in Nennigkofen in the Parish of Lüsslingen, Canton Solothurn, Switzerland, then the Canton Helvetica. His exact year of birth and parentage is undetermined, but it has been established that he was Reformed in faith and therefore belonged to an extreme religious minority in Solothurn since the canton was primarily Catholic. In this regard, his passage to Pfalz-Zweibrücken is consistent with a historical pattern. Overpopulation and religious issues drove Swiss Protestants from their country in record numbers during the 1600s, particularly at a time when the Duchy of Pfalz-Zweibrücken was in need of agricultural workers and skilled laborers. As such, the Dukes of the Pfalz attracted the Swiss to the area, and many to meet the call came from the Cantons of Bern and Solothurn. In the Reformed Parish of Rieschweiler, one of the first in Westrich to resume record keeping in the 1680s, numerous Swiss Auswanderer families appear in the registers. It is of note that nearly none of the parishes of Westrich, the land lying between Zweibrücken and Pirmasens, retained any records prior to 1670. Although Nünschweiler, Contwig, and Hornbach were historically the larger parishes in the southern section of Westrich, many of the townspeople and farming families had to travel a great distance to attend a place of worship because Nünschweiler was left without a minister from the time theirs had been killed by Croatian or Spanish-allied soldiers during the Thirty Years’ War. As a result, one will find townspeople from all over in the parishes of Zweibrücken, Pirmasens, Mittelbrunn, Wallhalben, and Hornbach during the interim years. It is also important to note that many families prior to the Thirty Years’ War had been Catholic, though Catholic records predating 1680 in this region are exceptionally rare, the bulk of them probably having been destroyed during a war.
As smaller churches resumed services and record keeping, the number of Swiss emigrants who settled on the Höfe as tenant farmers had become apparent. Rieschweiler’s minister during the 1690s, Pfarrer Isaac Isenmann, a native of the Canton Helvetica, made careful note of all formerly Swiss individuals in his parish, mentioning their cantons and villages of birth where applicable. This list extends throughout most of Isenmann’s pastorate, 1696 to 1737, although one will find the occasional mention of Schweizer individuals in earlier entries. It is in the Parish of Rieschweiler that we find one of the larger branches of the Theodor Knerr’s family, headed by one of his eldest sons, known as Nikolaus Knerr. Swiss-born, Nikolaus is believed to have emigrated with his father and around 1670 settled in the milling town of Walshausen and married Elisabetha Schwartz, a descendant of a pre-1648 family that belonged to Nünschweiler parish.
This brings us full-round to the effects of pedigree collapse: Nikolaus and Elisabetha Schwartz Knerr are my ancestors twice over, and through Elisabetha, I descend from my own paternal Schmitt ancestors (and numerous other families from Nünschweiler parish) twice over as well. For modern descendants of Pfälzer families, this level of pedigree collapse is quite typical.
Interestingly, the full extent of Theodor Knerr’s original family is unclear, and some members have been contested by historians. In the next installment of this article, I will outline what has been established for this Knerr/Knörr lineage in terms of family structure and will note what warrants further research.
In my 2014 article “The German Pioneers of Punxsutawney and the Zweibrücken-Pirmasens Emigration, 1820-1900,” published in The Jeffersonian Journal (Brookville, PA), I wrote in great detail about a matter to which I have committed the better part of a decade: tracing a chain migration from the Pfalz to the Ohio River Valley, a decades-long and systematic outpouring of farming families that began in earnest around 1831. American descendants of these families—particularly those around Luthersburg, Punxsutawney, and Big Run, PA—have long known about their deep connections to the Rheinpfalz, especially Pirmasens and Zweibrücken, in what was formerly the Kingdom of Bavaria. However, relatively few today realize quite to what extent those connections overlapped with the thousands of families that left the Duchy of Pfalz-Zweibrücken for the American Midwest and Mid-Atlantic region. Throughout the past four years in particular, I have been chronicling the histories of these families and compiling a massive database of emigrants—two books well in development, with plans for more, and most likely an online database.
In 2016, I had the good fortune of traveling with my wife to Europe, where we were able to tour the Pfalz-Zweibrücken in addition to the greater Rhineland region. There, I had an experience similar to what I imagine many German Americans must experience, returning for the first time in over a century to the towns my ancestors built and rebuilt throughout centuries of warfare—the uncanny sensation of seeing one’s name, centuries old, chiseled over doorways, or walking through the churchyards where the countless, unmarked graves of my ancestors have long laid. Undoubtedly, I was the first in my family in nearly a century to even know the name of the town where our family resided. While in Zweibrücken, I also had the fortune to meet with a longtime genealogical correspondent—a native Zweibrücker and distant cousin—who kindly showed us from town to town and shared his stories of growing up in the area. What I learned in the process is that though many in Pfalz-Zweibrücken and many in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky are aware of their mutual ancestry, there has been relatively little, mostly scattered correspondence between researchers over the past 100 years. What I would like to do here is to examine the broader context of my research and survey a few of the previous studies to summarize the work I’ve been actively developing concerning this group.
Past Histories of the Pirmasensers in Western Pennsylvania
Over the past forty years, several family historians have attempted chronicles of these post-1830s families, though nearly all of them have been limited to particular family groups. The most expansive of these was and remains A History of the Knarrs and Knerrs in the United States: Descendants of Theodor Knerr (1618-1688) (1997), a self-published genealogical history by retired educator Laurence “Larry” Edward Knarr of Cincinnati, Ohio, now deceased. Although this history is primarily composed of genealogical registers, the broader purpose of the work underscores just how many American families descend from one Swiss-Pfälzer ancestor—Durrs Knerr, known as Theodor Knerr after his emigration to the Pirmasens section of Pfalz-Zweibrücken. Knarr and his many correspondents, including Adolf Rothaar, a fellow school teacher and prominent local historian of Pirmasens, compiled for the first time a massive number of records dealing with Knerr descendants, extracted from the relevant parish church records and civil documents in Pirmasens and Zweibrücken. In later years, Knarr digitally published large portions of his tree, much of which is still available online, and the Family History Library of the LDS Church has since kindly digitized Knarr’s book.
Rothaar’s participation in the collaborative Ortschronik 700 Jahre Gersbach (1996) led to one of the few German-language documents discussing in specificity the number of Pfalz-Zweibrückers and Pirmasensers in Clearfield County, PA. In his chapter on Gersbacher Auswanderer, Rothaar describes a 1986 reunion of Gersbacher emigrant families held in 1986 and then outlines the social conditions that led to the chain migration from Pirmasens beginning in 1830. Of note is the list of emigrant families Rothaar compiled, which includes families like Haag, Knerr, Weber, Rischel, Mörschel, Ziliox, Faudi, Wingert, Heilbrunn, Korb, Hatzfeld, and others. Rothaar also describes the earliest extant parish register of the Salem Lutheran Church, located near Troutville, PA, which was founded primarily by these Gersbacher families. One detail Rothaar does not mention, however, is that the Salem Lutheran Congregation was a second-generation congregation for the Pfalz-Zweibrückers, founded only after a theological schism divided all the Reformed and Lutheran Union churches in the area. Formerly, the German-speaking churches were unions of Reformed and Lutheran peoples, grouped under one charge, but the arrival of a Prussian-born evangelische minister, Carl Christian A. Brandt, led to a divorce of all the old emigrant congregations.
In my previously mentioned article, I discuss the history of these congregations and how they were initially led by the same three ministers in succession due to the scarcity of accredited German Reformed ministers in Western Pennsylvania at the time. In truth, German-speaking settlers from the Pfalz had founded three “union” [vereinigte] churches, the oldest of these probably being the old union church near Luthersburg, PA, followed shortly by the German Reformed Congregation of Punxsutawney, founded by my paternal ancestors and their neighbors in the late 1830s. One other union church stood in nearby Indiana County around North Mahoning Township, and what is now Canoe Township, but that congregation was primarily a group of emigrants from a related chain migration from Schlüchtern in the Landgraftschaft Hessen-Kassel in the Grand Duchy of Hessen. Another church included in the charge was the Paradise Settlement Church, although that particular church was not a post-1830 emigrant church but rather one founded by older German-speaking families associated with Friedrich “Frederick” Kühnle and the Pifers, who pioneered the surroundings.
The earliest congregations of Pfälzers in Punxsutawney and Luthersburg were led by a lay minister and circuit rider from Prussia named Johannes Althaus, often recorded in English as John Althouse, although sadly, the earliest records of both the Punxsutawney and Luthersburg congregations have been destroyed or permanently lost for many years. In my many years of research, I have come across only one baptismal certificate signed by Rev. Althaus, verifying his name’s spelling and handwriting. Althaus was succeeded by another lay minister, Johann Ferdinand Engelbach, and he by Rev. Brandt, who helped the Lutherans form separate congregations, ending the union.
Cemeteries associated with these congregations have also suffered great wear—today, only portions of the Luthersburg Union Cemetery still stand, the Punxsutawney German Reformed cemetery having been razed in a controversial act by that churches Board of Trustees (removal of stones began in the 1920s, with the remainder removed in the 1960s).
As such, generally little has been written on the earliest Pfälzers of the area because the best primary-source records of their life in these communities have largely been obliterated, leaving what cultural legacy has survived with their descendants and the few scattered records one can recover. More complications arise from the fact that the German-speaking emigrants from after 1830 were somewhat reserved in their engagement with local government, tending not to leave wills and to only handle land sales between family and neighbors, or with other Germans in urban communities like Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. The congregations I have mentioned remained primarily German-speaking until the 1890s, which led to the dissolution of most of the congregations as they had been (it is most likely that church records fell into disrepair between 1890 and 1920, possibly destroyed by flooding or lack of stewardship). Allegedly, it was only at the impassioned appeal of Adam Schneider, a Herschberg bei Wallhalben native, that the Punxsutawney congregation was saved from shuttering in the 1890s.
My paternal grandfather’s ancestors, the Smiths of Punxsutawney, PA, ranked among the earliest of the Pfalz-Zweibrücken families to come to greater-Punxsutawney area, having been preceded there by a few family groups about one year prior. They are kith and kin to a majority of the families I have already named (particularly the Knerr and Weber groups), though I did not know this when I first began my research. Over the years, I personally discovered through archival research in America and Germany that my Schmitt ancestors are likely the oldest surviving lineage (in name) of the town of Nünschweiler. Relatively few male branches of this family, which dates back to before 1564 in the Schultheißerei Nünschweiler and its various associated parishes, have emigrated to the United States. My emigrant ancestors—a single couple and three children who settled in Punxsutawney in 1833—have helmed what is likely its largest group of descendants in America. One of the most common family names in Europe, and yet one of the more limited lineages, our family is typical of the Dreißiger (1830s) period of emigration: a liberal, Reformed Protestant, better-to-do farming family that sought refuge in America during a time of great trouble for the Pfalz agriculturally and politically.
In the Historical Museum of the Pfalz in the city of Speyer on the Rhine, one will find a plaque commemorating the year 1832 standing next to a wooden family trunk dating to around that time. Looking at this trunk, I imagined it must have resembled the kind my family would have trucked across Europe and then across New York in their journey to the Alleghenies. The plaque describes the underlying cause of the flight from Pfalz-Zweibrücken: crop failures, wet seasons, the rise of German liberalism, and the consequent discontent among the families that tended farms in the Pfälzer valleys. Although my paternal family in America is small compared to the extent of Colonial American family groups, and shares more ancestral ties to the Pfalz than it does most American states, its greatest context in American history, I realize, has much to do with that plaque and what it signifies. The Pfälzer families who came to Pennsylvania and Ohio came to America not simply to escape ducal law and its instability but because they wanted the liberty to shape their own society: the power to control their families’ means of survival—how one lives, and how one dies.
It should come as no surprise, though, that when these Pfälzer families came to America, the ones who settled in rural areas outside of the great German cities of America—Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis—settled in small communities of other German speakers and continued to practice in various fashions their towns’ political practices. Although it took me the better part of a decade to figure it out, I recently determined that my Schmitt family, after settling in Punxsutawney, practiced the same code of inheritance upheld Pfalz-Zweibrücken, and continued this practice until nearly 1900. So determined were the older generations to preserve their identities that it nearly brought their churches to collapse. It’s important to note that Western Pennsylvania and Ohio had welcomed German emigrants long before 1832, but the German-speakers who came to the United States in 1832 and after were quite distinct in culture, even from those who had left similar regions in the late 18th century. Their sense of politics and national identity had been shaped by conflicts and tide shifts that their former countryman did not experience, one large example being the Napoleonic Wars, which led to the end of the Holy Roman Empire and the consequent expansion of Kingdoms of Prussia and Bavaria as powers. Although there was a time in Central European history when Rheinpfalz—historically an electorate of Bavaria—stood a chance at being a political force of influence, by the time Duke of Pfalz-Zweibrücken, Maximilian I Joseph, declared himself king of the Königsreich Bayern, the Pfalz had been largely diminished. Under King Maximilian, the Pfalz became a place where liberalism took root, which led to the famed Hambacher Fest in 1832, several years after Maximilian’s death and the accession of his son, King Ludwig I, whose legacy is mixed. Interestingly, many post-1832 emigrants from the Pfalz when asked to renounce their loyalties to the King of Bavaria listed King Maximilian rather than Ludwig, despite Maximilian having died in 1825. This was true for both my ancestor Georg Jakob Schmitt and his younger brother Johann Wilhelm Schmitt, who became naturalized U. S. citizens in the early 1840s.
My Schmitt family was one of the first five families from the old Schultheißerei Nünschweiler to come to the Punxsutawney area, but the first Pfalz-Zweibrücken families to settle in the area were in fact from Lemberg near Pirmasens parish. When I refer to the Schultheißerei Nünschweiler, I am referring to a historical parish that once involved the nearby towns of Walshausen, Windsberg, Dellfeld, Höheischweiler (often called Eschweiler), Hengsberg, Bottenbach, Kleinsteinhausen, Großsteinhausen, and the numerous small Höfe (tenant farms) in between. Pirmasens, on the other hand, was and remains one of the larger cities of the region. Despite the city-country divide, there was a fair amount of crossover between families historically. To get a sense of the geography, must imagine Zweibrücken to the west, Pirmasens to the east, and in between, the numerous farming and milling towns like Walshausen and Hengsberg that grew along the brooks and rivers that since the Roman era had supported civilization.
The towns, villages, and Höfe associated with Pirmasens extend quite far from the city itself in all directions, although it’s worth noting that most of the families who emigrated and settled in the rural counties north of Pittsburgh primarily came from the south and west of Pirmasens and not so much its direct east or north. The towns I’m referring to, where the bulk of the emigrants came from, are Gersbach, Winzeln, and Lemberg, which lie on the outer, southern city limits. To a lesser extent, one sees in Punxsutawney and Luthersburg emigrants from Vinningen to the south, as well as Höhfröschen and Thaleischweiler to the north, but those were primarily families that had roots in the towns I’ve already mentioned.
The Earliest Pirmasensers in the Punxsutawney-Luthersburg area
Most sources indicate that the first Pirmasenser families to settle near Punxsutawney and Luthersburg, PA were those of Johann Peter Buchheit and Johann Jacob Kuntz, both of Lemberg. Both families settled in an undeveloped, rural section between what is now Henderson Township, Jefferson County, and Brady Township, Clearfield County, near the settlement of Luthersburg. Surrounded by Pennsylvania German families of older stock, their settlement established something of a base for future Pirmasenser emigrants, who would later become central to the development of these townships. Although Brady Township, Clearfield County, had existed since 1827, Henderson Township, Jefferson County, which forms the border between the two counties, was not organized until 1857. Prior to then, most of the land composing Henderson was part of Gaskill Township, itself formed from Young Township in 1842. As such, it is occasionally unclear where exactly some of the early German settlements were prior to 1840, although it has been established that most of the ones in question could be found between what is now Big Run and the town of Luthersburg. Young Township, Jefferson County, where the Borough of Punxsutawney is located, also became a large place of settlement for Pfälzers, beginning with my own ancestors who arrived in 1833 and were followed by numerous other families from Pfalz-Zweibrücken, although those who settled north and east from Punxsutawney were primarily from the Schultheißerei Nünschweiler and Herschberg near Wallhalben.
Lemberger Settlers in Luthersburg
Luthersburg, Clearfield County was named for its first settler, Lebbeus Luther, who in 1820 came to this part of Brady Township and shortly after acted as a land agent, selling tracts to incoming settlers, the first of whom were Benjamin Bonsall and Frederick Zeigler. It is likely that Luther or his grantees probably sold the first tracts to Pirmasensers like Kuntz and Buchheit.
Johann Peter Buchheit was born in the town of Lemberg, Pirmasens, Pfalz-Zweibrücken on 3 January 1785. He was the son of Johann Peter Buchheit (b. 1753) and Maria Barbara Zirkel, who were wed in the Lutheran parish of Lemberg 23 February 1779. Peter Buchheit the younger’s baptism was recorded in the parish of Vinningen, my translation of which follows:
On the 3rd of January (1785), at 8 in the evening, a child was born to Peter Buchheid, a citizen of Lemberg, by his wife Barbara, maiden name Zirkel, and was baptized on the 6th, named Johann Peter. Godparents: Diebold Keim, citizen of Lemberg; Johann Adam Buchheid, unmarried, legitimate son of Joseph Buchheit citizen of here (Lemberg); Salome, widow of Johannes Schaaf, deceased fence-builder, also of Lemberg; and Anna Elisabeth, wife of Heinrich Knopf, also a citizen of Lemberg.
Below the entry, the signatures of the godparents and father are included, revealing a few points of relationship (Salome the widow signed her maiden name “Buchheit”) and verifying important spelling differences (Buchheit rather than “Buchheid,” Theobald rather than “Diebolt”). It is rare to find signatures like this below baptisms, though one will find the practice running strong during the years of the Napoleonic government. Holographs (original signatures) on documents are especially valuable because spelling was hardly fixed, particularly in pre-contemporary German, where so much of spelling depended on the dialect and learning of the person holding the pen. A signature from this period can at least confirm the one “correct” or preferred spelling of their name, in the absence of legal documents like those we have today.
Peter Buchheit the younger [die Jüngere] came of age during a period of great transition for the Pfalz-Zweibrücken. As a boy, he witnessed the onset of the Napoleonic Wars, beginning with the War of the First Coalition, a conflict that reached the southern Pfalz long before it would other parts of the Holy Roman Empire. According to most accounts, the armies of the First French Republic entered the Zweibrücken-Pirmasens area in early 1793, when the Zweibrücken palace was stormed and heavily damaged by French forces. In September, a large battle was fought between French and Prussian forces in Pirmasens, resulting in a major loss for the French, although the French would occupy the Pfalz for many years to come. Peter Buchheit the younger and his contemporaries came of age as the political loyalties of the duchy shifted, gradually leading to Duke Maximilian I Joseph declaring Bavaria its own kingdom and allying with Napoleon in 1806. Toward the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Maximilian turned against Napoleon under the condition that Bavaria could retain its status as a kingdom.
Locating vital records for Pfälzer emigrants in the 1830s and 1840s can be quite challenging because of the Napoleonic takeover. Beginning around 1806 (earlier in some sections) the various parishes of Pfalz-Zweibrücken were forced by the French government to maintain civil registers, the entries of which were recorded in the notoriously tricky French Revolutionary Calendar. It is worth noting that while the churches did not relinquish their record keeping, there are significant gaps in most Pfälzer church books around 1794-1800 and 1806 to 1814. These gaps pose problems to researching anyone who was born or came of age during these years, which includes most of the families I have thus far discussed.
Around 1809, Peter Buchheit married Susanna Elisabetha Kästner, also of Lemberg. As one would expect of the Napoleonic period, no marriage record appears in the parish records of Lemberg, Pirmasens, or Luthersbrunn, although birth records for their children help verify that the marriage was legitimate. According to entries collected in the Lemberg Evangelische Kirchenbücher, between 1810 to 1826, nine children were born and baptized in the Buchheit-Kästner family, beginning with son Georg Heinrich Buchheit, born 3 April 1810 in Lemberg. The baptismal record for Heinrich is especially bare, listing only the time of birth (7 AM) and the parentage, described as “Maria Elisabetha Kästner, Peter Buchheit des Jüngen Ehefrau.” In this record, the Taufname is also excluded, giving “Heinrich” as the only name, though later records hold that Buchheit’s baptismal name was “Georg.” It is important to note the lack of Taufnamen in these records because in certain cases, the name given at birth is not what the individual went by in America, as was the case with Friederich Jacob Buchheit (b. 15 April 1821), who went by Friederich after his family’s emigration.
The last known child in this family born while in Lemberg was Carolina Buchheit, born 24 Feb 1826, named for her one listed sponsor, Carolina, wife of Heinrich Danner of Lemberg. In this entry, a baptismal date is included as Feb 26, making hers one of the rare, mostly complete entries.
I note this last entry because the date of residence for the family does not neatly align with narratives concerning their emigration and settlement in Pennsylvania. In William J. McKnight’s Jefferson County, Pennsylvania: Her Pioneers and People, Vol. II, a biography appears for George August Buhite, a grandson of Peter and Elisabetha Kästner Buchheit through their son Georg. This bio states that the “grandfather, Peter Buhite, a native of Germany, brought his family to America in 1824, and settled in what is now Henderson township [. . . ] The parents remained on the old homestead, about one mile west of Troutville, until they died” (324). While the residential information is useful, the baptismal records left in the Lutheran parish of Lemberg simply do not corroborate an 1824 emigration date. At earliest, the family could have left Europe later in 1826, but the risks of bringing an infant aboard a transcontinental ship make a later date of departure far more likely. In any case, estimating the family’s correct time of emigration is tricky.
It is my estimate that the family likely emigrated between 1828 and 1829, arriving in Western Pennsylvania early enough to have purchased their tract of undeveloped farmland before the 1830 census. Identifying the correct date is further complicated by the fact that the father, like many of the older Pfälzers in the Punxsutawney area, never became a naturalized citizen. Typically, it is the petition for naturalization that provides the best record trail for Germans in these counties, but there is no guarantee that all who resided in or passed through actually sought citizenship.
The 1830 United States Federal Census for Brady Township, Clearfield County lists the family under the head of household “Peter Boohite,” a male between the age 40 and 50: accurate, given his birth year of 1785. The tallymark presumably representing his wife Elisabetha falls under Women between the ages of 40 and 50. Six minors are accounted for: two males between the ages of 15 and 20; one between 10 and 15; and one between 5 and 10. Two minor females (presumably daughters) are also listed: one between 10 and 15, and another under the age of 5. Of the nine children recorded in Lemberg parish, the only children confirmed to have arrived at adulthood in Jefferson County were Johann Georg Buchheit (b. 1811), Elisabetha Buchheit (b. 1817), and Friederich Jacob Buchheit (b. 1821). It is almost certain that Georg, Elisabetha (who married George Schucker of Clearfield County), and Friederich Buchheit number among the children in the 1830 record, meaning that one daughter and two sons remain unaccounted for. The youngest son in all likelihood is probably Johann Adam Buchheit (b. 1823) and the youngest daughter Carolina Buchheit (b. 1826), given that they are the only recorded children who would neatly fit within the age groups indicated. The second-eldest son could potentially be Georg Jacob Buchheit, assuming that the eldest son in the family (Georg Heinrich) passed away or was not living with the family, as the only other son, Peter Buchheit (b. 1815) died as an infant in Lemberg. Some recollections of the family hold that there were eleven children in the family, but whether tally this takes into account stillbirths or infant deaths is uncertain.
The next record featuring the Peter Buchheit family is the 1840 United States Census for Young Township, Jefferson County, reflecting a border change between Jefferson and Clearfield Counties. This land would in 1857 become Henderson Township. The 1840 family tally under “Peter Bohite” remains mostly the same as the 1830 census, with two significant changes: one of the oldest sons no longer resides with the family, and all daughters listed previously are missing as well. The 1850 Census for the same property shows Peter Buchheit and wife Elizabeth residing with their son Friederich, his wife Elisabeth (Weber), and their two youngest children, Peter and Elizabeth. Their neighbors include their former countrymen Georg Heinrich Lott, previously of Winzeln bei Pirmasens, and Adam Weiß, of Hilst, a borough near Lemberg. Georg Buchheit lives with his wife Catharina Lang and children at an adjacent property. These arrangements remain the same in the 1860 Census, the last record to list Peter and Elisabetha Kästner Buchheit. It is presumed that the couple passed away at the home of their son at some undetermined point after June 1860.
The Buchheit family, whose name occasionally appears anglicized to Buchhite and Buhite, developed substantially in Henderson Township, although only Friederich Buchheit remained in the area, his brother Georg having departed for Minnesota around the 1870s or 1880s and died in that state in 1888. According to some accounts, Friederich Buchheit appears to have died in a rafting accident 20 Nov 1862 at the age of 41; his wife Elisabetha Weber, also a Pirmasenser, survived him by only three years, at which point the children, the youngest of whom were all daughters, became orphans and were appointed local guardians. All of these children married into families originating in the Pirmasens district.
The family of Johann Jacob Kuntz, also of Lemberg, appears in the Jefferson-Clearfield area only one or two years after the Buchheits made their settlement. Although technically Peter Buchheit’s junior by about 14 years, the same record gaps in Lemberg’s Lutheran parish also affect this Kuntz family. Fortunately, a clearer paper trail exists for Jacob Kuntz, allowing us to confidently date his emigration and settlement in Pennsylvania. His prominence and activism in Brady Township’s economic and social development likewise resulted in his being one of the few German pioneers to be mentioned abundantly in county histories like Lewis Cass Aldrich’s History of Clearfield County, Pennsylvania (1887), in which Kuntz name appears many times.
On 5 December 1831, Jacob Kuntz filed a petition for naturalization in the court of Clearfield County, PA. Although inaccuracies sometimes crop up in such petitions, the details Kuntz provided appear to be plausible. In the petition text, he states that he, “Jacob Kuntz was born in the town of Permacence [sic] in Bavaria on the first day of January 1799 and is now about the age of 32 years, that he was born a member of the Kingdom of Bavaria and owe [sic] a allegiance to the King of Bavaria [. . . ] that he immigrated from Havre de Grace, France to the United States and arrived at the port of New York on or about 16 July 1830, and that it is his intention to settle in Brady Township.”
From this petition, we know a few important details: Kuntz’s approximate birth date; the timeframe of his emigration through Western Europe to the U. S.; his settlement in Brady Township, which had to have occurred within the year of his emigration; and the preferred spelling of his given name and surname, visible in his German-cursive holograph on this document: [Jacob Kuntz]. Generally, the bulk of naturalization petitions were transcribed by a notary, though unlike land documents retained by the county courts, the petitioners would actually sign their names on the transcribed document. These holographs offer the best evidence for how German-speaking individuals spelled their names prior to any Americanization that might have occurred as they assimilated.
In the Lutheran parish of Lemberg (in the set of books held in the Landeskirchenarchiv in Speyer), we find a baptismal record for Jacob, giving his date of birth as 2 January 1798: within a day and a year of the date offered in his petition. The record states the Johann Jacob Kuntz was born on the 2nd of January in Lemberg, the son of Lemberg’s honorable Schultheiss, Heinrich Kuntz, and wife Anna Barbara Schoch, and was baptized at Lemberg on the 4th. His baptismal sponsors included Michael Ziegler, a citizen of Lemberg; Jacob Schoch of Winzeln, brother of Anna Barbara Schoch Kuntz; Susanna Margaretha, wife of Ludwig Weber; and Anna Elis., wife of Wendel Schatz or Schratz, a citizen of Lemberg.
Interestingly, because Jacob Kuntz descends from the Schoch family of Winzeln, this means that he was of close relationship to many of the Weber families that settled between Luthersburg and Big Run, PA in the 1840s: a 2nd-cousin to the two wives of Heinrich Jacob Weber, who settled near Big Run in Jefferson County.
Missing from parish church books is the record of Jacob Kuntz’s circa-1822 marriage to Catherine Jacki (also, Jacky), often recorded phonetically in English as “Yockey.” American histories of this family retained that Catherine was the daughter of a Caspar Yockey, who emigrated to the United States around 1837 and died in 1839 (likely in Pennsylvania or Ohio), and this appears to be accurate information.
Research in Bas-Rhin, France and Pirmasens reveals many insights to this family’s history. The French spelling of “Catherine” (as opposed to German Catharina or Katharina) is intentional. Although the Jacki family has roots in Lemberg and Rumbach parish, the name is widespread across the old Alsatian border of the Pfalz, which has shifted greatly throughout European history. It is presumed to be a derivate of the Swiss-German surname Jaggi, which itself is a diminutive of Jacob, suggesting a Swiss origin for this line. Catherine Jacki was born to parents Caspar Jacki and Marie Catherine Helmstetter on 21 May 1800 in Petersbach, Bas-Rhin, France, which although within French territory was German-speaking. Families in historical Haut- and Bas-Rhin often share close ties to families in Pirmasens, as families throughout history often moved to and from these territories, especially after periods of war. Petersbach researcher Philippe Jung, using parish information, established that Caspar Jacki was a “Fuhrmann und Ackersmann in Petersbach” and “später ein Ackersmann in Lemberg bei Pirmasens”: a wagon-builder and farm-laborer in Petersbach, and later a farm-laborer in Lemberg. The change of residence is significant because it suggests how Jacob Kuntz and Catherine Jacki came into contact.
While the all-important Kuntz-Jacki marriage record has not been located, baptisms for a large number of children verify their marriage and residence throughout the 1820s.
The first of these is Friedrich Kuntz, born 27 April 1823 at either Ruhbank or Langmühle (the baptismal record does not clearly delineate but states that the father Jacob Kuntz resided at the Langmühle). The baptism, held April 29, gives the mother as Catharina Jacki and father as Jacob Kuntz of Langmühle, a small milling community south of Lemberg. Given that Jacob Kuntz later established his own gristmill in Clearfield County, it is most likely that he was working as a Mühlknecht (mill laborer/apprentice) as a young man. On a related note, an amazing number of the Pirmasensers to come to Jefferson and Clearfield Counties had backgrounds in milling, either as proprietors or laborers, my own ancestors included. One consideration seldom taken into account by American historians is that many of these milling families may have chosen to emigrate earlier than others (early-to-mid 1830s) because mills were more likely to see the effects of bad seasons and crop conditions, as well as any environmental problems like pollution from the cities. Mills were vital to the sustainability of towns in Westrich, and if crop output deteriorated or was shorted, the mills could not produce, meaning no flour or animal feed to meet local demand. It is no wonder so many of them fled to the United States: a miller or mill worker would have likely been keen to larger systemic problems in the food supply.
In the 1827 baptismal record for daughter Elisabetha Kuntz, Jacob is recorded as a “Feldschütz zu Lemberg” (a crop watchman), though it’s unclear if this was his only occupation since a crop watchman tended to only be necessary during harvest times. The final baptism recorded in the Kuntz-Jacki family is that of Ludwig Kuntz, born in 1829, presumably named for Jacob’s younger brother. This baptismal entry is incomplete but states that “a son named Ludwig Kunz, child of Catharina Jacky, lawful wife of Jacob Kunz, a farm worker of Lemberg, was born on December 6th and was baptized.”
Given the amount of clearance time involved in applications for emigration (assuming Jacob Kuntz emigrated legally), Kuntz would have applied to leave the Pfalz no later than March 1830, as an accepted application generally resulted in a public disclaimer stating that the applicant and their family could emigrant generally 1 to 3 months time after the permission was published. Aldrich’s History of Clearfield County (1887) states that “In 1830, Jacob Kuntz, a native of Bavaria, Germany came and settled near where the Reformed Church now stands.” It goes on to give the birth year of Kuntz and his wife, though erroneously confuses 1778 for 1798 (likely a transcription error) for Jacob; the date given for Mrs. Kuntz, 1800, is accurate. An important note on the development of local roads mentions that the Luthersburg-Punxsutawney road “dates to the fall of 1830, when the near where Troutville now stands volunteered their services, among whom were the following: Jacob Kuntz, ‘Jerry’ Miles, Jonathan Ogden, and D Hoover; and on 15 April 1831, the first wagon passed over on its way to Punxsutawney; it was an old wagon brough from Germany by Jacob Kuntz.” These details suggest that Jacob Kuntz and family, having arrived in New York City in July 1830, must have traveled quickly, possibly to head off winter-weather conditions, by wagon to Clearfield County, arriving early enough to participate in the construction of this road.
The timing of these details are partially corroborated in the biographical account of the next Pirmasenser families to arrive in Luthersburg, that of Johann Georg Knerr and wife Maria Luisa Weißgerber of Gersbach. The book in which this account appears is A Commemorative Biographical Record of Central Pennsylvania, a multi-volume work from the late 1800s that collected solicited biographical accounts from families in Western Pennsylvania counties. The biography of their son Georg Adam Knerr, known in English as Adam Knarr, states that the family came to the United States in 1831, landing at the port of Philadelphia. The family there “purchas[ed] a team of horses and a wagon and started for Warren, Penn., traveling by way of Sunbury, Bellefonte, Clearfield, Curwensville, and Luthersburg.” On arriving Luthersburg, the family was met with a happy surprise:
While stopping for dinner at the latter place, they discovered through conversation with the landlord, an entire stranger to them, that a Mr. Jacob Kuntz, of Germany, lived in Brady township. An old neighbor of theirs of the same name movedd to America some time before, and on further inquiry Mr. Knarr found out that he was the man spoken of, so sought him out. After some consideration Mr. Knarr decided to remain in Brady township, rather than go on to Warren, and through the advice of of Mr. Kuntz he bought, at the present site of Troutville, 181 acres of heavily-timbered land with no improvements of any kind.
Emigration records support the time frame of the account. On 27 August 1831, the French sailing vessel Eugenia Girard arrived at the port of Philadelphia from Le Havre, France, carrying mostly German passengers: 36 family groups and 10 single people (not counting crew). Of the family groups, a noticeable number appear to have come from the Pirmasens region, although no places of origin for passengers is noted in the list. Aboard the ship, I have identified the following families of relevance: Christian Haag of Windsberg, with wife Maria Elisabetha Schlemmer and three children ; Georg Heinrich Joas of Gersbach, with wife Elisabetha Philippina Kuntz and six children; Heinrich Paul Sprau of Walshausen or Bottenbach, with wife Susanna Catharina Bähr and four children; and Johann Georg Knerr, mentioned before, with wife Luisa Weißgerber and five children. Several more families with names associated with Pirmasens and Pfalz-Zweibrücken appear on the list, though I have been unable to corroborate their identities, including a Jacob Sprau (born about 1802), Louisa Stegner, a domestic (born about 1811), potentially several members of Stephan family (a group from Burgalben), and a family under Frederic Wingert—quite possibly that of Georg Friedrich Wingert and Katharina Barbara Lott of Winzeln, who are known to have settled in Jefferson County around this time. In any case, a sizeable number of the passengers all originated in the same district, and my research suggests that many of these families traveled together, landing in Clearfield and Jefferson counties, including the Haags, Joases, and the Knerrs. It is unclear if the Spraus accompanied them, though we know that these Spraus settled in Pennsylvania and Ohio, making them likely travel partners from New York.
In same biography collection an entry for Samuel G. Kuntz, son of Jacob Kuntz, also appears, elaborating on the emigration details:
The late Jacob Kuntz, father of our subject, was born in Bavaria, Germany, and was married in the Fatherland to Fraulein Catherine Yockey. Some years were spent in their native country, and three children were born there; but, desiring for themselves and their family the wider opportunities for advancement to be found in the United States, they left the old home on May 5, 1830, and soon afterward sailed from Havre. Their long and tedious voyage ended July 19, 1830, at New York harbor, and they came at once to Union county, Penn., attracted by the fertile lands which were then being rapidly settled. On November 30, they took possession of a wooded tract near Troutville, where they made their permanent home, clearing and improving it for a farm.
Of the multiple accounts, this one is by far the most detailed, and while the date of arrival in New York varies from that given by Jacob Kuntz in 1831, the timeframe is probably well within the realm of accuracy, as would be the November 30 time of settlement in Clearfield County, as it would have benefited the family (especially with multiple children under the age of 10 in tow) to find a potential place for settlement before the arrival of winter. According to local lore, Kuntz’s Brady Township farm was located adjacent to where the original Trinity (Union) church once stood when its hall was still a hewn-log cabin.
One detail worth investigating is whether or not Jacob Kuntz and his brother Ludwig Kuntz, recorded as “Lewis” Kuntz in English, emigrated together. Aldrich’s history states that David Haney sold a land tract in southern Brady Township to Lewis Kuntz in 1832; this information suggests that the Kuntz brothers emigrated at least within the same two years, if not together.
The Buchheit and Kuntz Families in Pennsylvania
Jacob Kuntz contributed significantly to the development of Brady Township, involving himself in its affairs almost immediately after arrival. His children and their children were also contributing members of the German Protestant congregations in Clearfield County. According to Aldrich, Kuntz organized and taught a religious school for children from his own home near Troutville beginning in 1835 and was one of the original members of the Union congregation in that same locality, as was his brother. Between 1849 and 1850, Kuntz also constructed a grist mill on the eastern branch of Mahoning Creek, which he ran “profitably” until its sale around 1854 or 1855 (1855 according to one account), and also constructed a saw mill in this area. The grist mill (and possibly the saw mill) was later known as Rishel’s Mill, probably taken over Kuntz’s son-in-law Daniel Rishel. Kuntz’s son Samuel G. Kuntz, born 3 March 1845 in Brady Township, followed his father in the lumber business and continued in that line of work well into the later 1800s. In addition to his successes in milling and farming, Kuntz also workedas a merchant beginning in 1856 (after the sale of his mill) and held several public offices, including the first postmaster of Troutville and Democratic county commissioner from 1862 to 1865.
Kuntz’s daughter Susanna, born 9 Sep 1837 in Brady Township, was married in 1860 to Rev. Carl August Limberg, a German Reformed pastor who headed the Clearfield Charge during the 1850s and 1860s. Limberg was a widower, his previous wife being a Bertha Schmidt, and though being of German birth had resided in Wisconsin before coming to Pennsylvania. The Clearfield Charge, a part of the Pittsburgh Synod, included the German-speaking Reformed Churches in Luthersburg, Troutville, Punxsutawney, and the Little Round Top congregation in northern Indiana County, just south of Punxsutawney. Susanna and Rev. Limberg later took charge of the St. Paul’s Orphan’s Home (of the Reformed Church) in Butler, PA, where they remained until 1871 when Limberg returned to the pastorate. Susanna Kuntz Limberg lived to the old age of 85 years, passing away in Butler, PA on 12 June 1922, her obituary appearing in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and elsewhere. Her husband, Rev. Limberg, passed away in 1900 in the same locality.
At the time of his passing on 28 April 1892, Johann Jacob Kuntz was one of the oldest men in Brady Township and one of the last remaining early Luthersburg pioneers. He was survived by a large family in the Clearfield area, the descendants of whom still reside nearby. Three months prior to his death, the newest German Reformed congregation to have grown from the one Kuntz founded saw its dedication. This church is now St. Luke’s United Church of Christ, formerly German Reformed.
The pioneer Buchheit family of Henderson Township, Jefferson County likewise contributed to the development of what had been a mostly undeveloped part of Pennsylvania. An unmarked location near Sykesville is colloquially known as Bucheit’s Crossing, and it is believed that the early family played some role in early lumbering and milling efforts along this section of the Mahoning and its various forks.
In truth, the Kuntz and Buchheit groups are just two of many Pirmasenser and Zweibrücker families to have pioneered early Luthersburg and Troutville. In future articles, I will explore the lives and emigration stories of their contemporaries and neighbors in both Clearfield and Jefferson counties.
Bibliography
Commemorative Biographical Record of Central Pennsylvania: Including the Counties of Centre, Clearfield, Jefferson and Clarion, Containing Biographical Sketches of Prominent and Representative Citizens, and of Many of the Early Settled Families, vol. 1. Chicago: J. H. Beers & Co., 1898.
Evangelische Kirche Lemberg (Pirmasens, Pfalz, Bayern), Taufen, Tote 1788-1798, Prot. Landeskirchenarchiv Speyer, Speyer. FHL microfilm 488552. Family History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.
Evangelische Kirche Lemberg (Pirmasens, Pfalz, Bayern), Taufen, 1788-1805, 1806-1827, Zentralarchive der evangelischen Kirche der Pfalz, Speyer. Microfilm. http://www.archion.de
History of Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, edited by Lewis Cass Aldrich. Syracuse: D. Mason & Co., 1887.
Jacob Kuntz petition for naturalization (1831), Pennsylvania, Court of Common Pleas, Clearfield County Courthouse, Clearfield, Pennsylvania. FHL microfilm 1463030. Family History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.
Knarr, Laurence E. A History of the Knarrs and Knerrs in the United States: Descendants of Theodor Knerr (1618-1688). Cincinnati: Self-published, 1997.
Lady, David B. The History of the Pittsburgh Synod of the Reformed Church in the United States. Greensburg: C. M. Henry, 1920.
Lady, David B. A History of the St. Paul’s Orphans’ Home of the Reformed Church in the Untied States. Philadelphia: The Reformed Church in the United States, 1917.
McKnight, William James. Jefferson County, Pennsylvania: Her Pioneers and People, vol. II. Chicago: J. H. Beers & Co., 1917.
Rothaar, Adolf. “Gersbacher Auswanderer.” 700 Jahre Gersbach – eine Ortschronik, edited by Guido Glöckner. Pirmasens: 1996. http://www.ps-gersbach.de/?page_id=15
The Rheinland American: Genealogy 