By James M. Beidler
The joke I make about my personal pedigree in the U.S. is that it consists of “Pennsylvania German farmer stacked on top of Pennsylvania German farmer”. That’s a slight exaggeration as there’s a blacksmith and a shoemaker or two thrown in there for good measure, but the many lines that I’ve traced to Germany reveal that those ancestors were peasant-stock farmers in the villages of the 18th century German states before emigrating.
This is not atypical for those who came in the so-called “First Boat” of German arrivals to America. When I lecture, it’s not unusual for someone to raise a question along the lines of “My ancestor’s surname was ‘von [fill in any surname]’ and I’ve read that means they were nobility.” My tidy answer—particularly if the ancestry they are talking about stems from that “First Boat”—is that there was virtually no one from nobility who came to America in the First Wave (only exception I know about is Moravian Church leader Count Nicolaus von Zinzendorf, but that’s an entirely other story), since why would one trade a castle for a log cabin in the woods of this pioneering time?
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