ROOTS & BRANCHES

The first mass migration of German-speaking people to America consisted of 847 families arriving in New York in 1710.

For more than half a century, Henry Z “Hank” Jones Jr. has been their faithful chronicler, to the point that many of us simply call that migration “the Hank Jones Germans.”

He wrote the two-volume set The Palatine Families of New York: A Study of the German Immigrants Who Arrived in Colonial New York in 1710 in the mid-1980s and followed that book up with More Palatine Families and Even More Palatine Families, both of which included more information about some of the original families along with much information on other German immigrants.

Now, Jones has collated his many updates on the 847 families into The Palatine Families of New York–1710: A Supplement. The book is available from Jones’ website, www.hankjones.com

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I reported in “Roots & Branches” a few months ago about getting new information on the Daub family in Lebanon County.

My final thought in that series of columns was that I would carry to research to attempting to find precisely where immigrant Johann Daub, who arrived in America in 1763 and likely resided in Lebanon Township until buying land in Bethel Township in 1771, first lived.

Given the boundaries of Lebanon Township at the time—it then would have included all the townships with Lebanon, Cornwall and Annville names—along with references to him being found in the Heidelberg Reformed Church registers (present-day Schaefferstown to the east of Lebanon Township), I think it’s likely he was somewhere in what’s today South Lebanon Township.

At some point in ruminating about this, I hit upon the idea that perhaps Johann worked in the Cornwall iron mines—his area of origin in the Siegerland of Germany (modern-day North Rhine-Westphalia) was an iron-mining district. As a matter of fact, the Daub hometown of Eiserfeld literally mans “iron field.”

There are some records of the mine dating to the 18^th century and you can be sure I’ll be looking in them at some point.

In the meantime, all of this piqued my interest recently when Brett Reigh, an archivist with the Pennsylvania State Archives and longtime volunteer at the Cornwall Iron Furnace historic site, on the “Cornwall Oral History Project, 1980–1982” that featured clips from interviews Reigh transcribed.

A couple of things stood out: First, how much the Cornwall furnace and mines (combined with its 20^th century owner Bethlehem Steel) meant to the people in Lebanon County. Secondly, it showed how even though the State Archives is closed to the public, its staff is putting their time to productive use by working on projects they wouldn’t get to otherwise.

Reigh’s webinar on the oral history project is available for viewing at the URL, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNWU6XEh990