About The Book

Descendents of early German (Pennsylvania Dutch) immigrants in the first half of the eighteenth century will find this well documented book interesting as well as a genealogical source. Included are nearly 600 names of men and women who married Poffenberger family members along with the code which may help trace surnames to the first family. Also included are church records of several family lines.

This narrative makes the information-dense and biographical documentation a valuable source of facts as well as pleasurable reading. The epic story begins with the birth of Johann Georg Pfaffenberger in 1698 in Eastern Franken. He migrated as a young man to Western Franken where he worked as an itinerant blacksmith. After his marriage to Martha Shuck, they had six children. In 1733, after seventeen years of the family moving from village to village, he received permission to leave the princely state of Zweibrucken and join in the mass immigration from the Palatinate. Follow the story as told by one who made the journey down the Rhine to Amsterdam and the long and difficult voyage to America.

They arrived in Philadelphia harbor on the ship Mary, 29th of September 1733. Also on board was 19-year-old Margaretha Kettle, who, as the result of a shipboard romance, became the mother of their oldest son’s child. Other ships arrived that fall with families that became associated with the Pfaffenbergers, including Kantner, Stupp, Gally, Grubb, Seibert, Stump, Props, Sherman, Riegel and Wildfang.

Live with these and other families in the primitive country of the Tulpehocken River, south of the Susquehanna, still occupied by Indians. The reader is offered a view of the character and life of early Germans including conflicts among early religious sects and the humorous battles among preachers as to who was most able to save the souls of church members. Soon they faced the terror, bloodshed and panic of the French and Indian War and in the remote valley of the headwaters of the Potomac in Virginia, the oldest son is killed in an Indian massacre. Then follow a few women and children captives taken to villages along the Ohio and experience their lives with the Indians.

The beginning of the Revolutionary war was fought near their homes and many family members served General Washington. Years later, the Battle of Antietam, the most costly of the Civil War, was fought in part on three Poffenberger farms with the action presented in vivid description. Some were not able to adjust to what they found on their return.

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ISBN13 (TP) 978-1-4363-9339-3
ISBN13 (HB) 978-1-4363-9340-9