Two traditions

There are two traditions among Pennsylvania German folk, a farcical, profane, idolatrous, Balaam of hexes on barns and sex abstention  in Conrad Beissel's Ephrata spiritual virgins,  and  and its opposite of tantric sex in Count Zinzendorf, which some argue afficted William Blake in this.

 The other tradition is high minded, peaceful, struggling against war, persecuted agonists of contradiction like Moses or David or Adam before that, standing against the principalities and powers, which examples occur in the Diarium of Magister Johannes Kelpius. These follow after Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Breugel the Elder.

 These two strains appear in the Pa Dutch the angel and the artist in the Germanic sects that practice such ludicrous lawless perversions of their brother’s faith, mocking it in many forms while both practicing it and denying it. All of it together is entertaining to the minds we have left in the wilderness that remains. So the history of the settlement of Penna by these folk is full of absurdity and sincerity and its understanding will require identifying the names and biographs of these from 1683 to 1760 thereabouts, which can be further delimited to from 1709 to 1760, about 50 years. So here is list of names that will appear in these findings, but it is obviously incomplete, hence imagine volumes 2 and 3 and one with different selections and names. So be it. 

There is a rabbinical side to this religion and a cabbalistic, or put another way an attempt at true understanding of the scriptures and a perversion of them in Baal work so that on any given day we might have pages open from Second Temple understandings of Psalm 8 to Ovid’s metamorphoses, the slender archives of old Mennonites of the Skippack and Franconia Conferences of the 18^th cent to the electronic text corpus of Inanna and Enki and multiplicity of German sects, such as Moravians, Mennonites and Dunkards,

When I first realized and discovered the existence of this community and its families and wanted to reconstruct it by showing the relations in as great detail as possible the identity of names places and biographies followed.

Michael Ziegler

Hans Reiff

Peter Miller  his intervention with Geo Wash for  Michael Widman

Conrad Beissel

Gottlieb Mitteberger

Matthius Baumann, Oley

Philip Kulhwein

Conrad Reiff

John Philip Boehm

Jacob Reiff

Rev. George Michael Weiss (1697-1762) The titular head of a colony that arrived en masse in 1727 whose real powers were the Hillegasses, who immediately on landing deposed John Philip Boehm from his pastorates bcause he was “unliscensd”, but whose desire for advancement made him  embark in 1730 on  a fundraising tour to Holland etc on a year and half trip,  chaperoned by Jacob Reiff, then unattached, with a history of public ventures that already by then made him universally respected. This trip compromised both. Weiss abandoned the effort, returned to PA but refused to carry the funds with him and disappeared to New York, not to return for many years. He was author of the second publication in the colony in 1729, Der In der Americanischen Wildnusz (Bradford) on the New born (Tr in see Penn Germania I, 338-361)and of a work, both lost and Account of the Indians (1743) on the indians, both first of their kind, an example of the intellectual acumen common among many of these immigrants.

Frederick Hillegas, Skippack

Peter and Michael Hillegas, Phila

Dr. Jacob Diemer

 Rev. Michael Schlatter

William j. Hinke. THE EARLY HISTORY OF WENTZ'S REFORMED CHURCH, MONTGOMERY CO., PA

Zinzendorf,

Strassburger

Betlemen

Skippack

New providence, Trappe

Salford

Ephrata

Oley

Henry S. Dotterer, James Heckler, Alderfer-librarian,

Methacton,  Strassburger (Ralph Beaver Strassburger, The Strassburger Family,

John Joseph Stoudt

Christopher Saur (Sower, Sauer) 1693-1758 In 1738 Sauer began to publish almanacs, calendars, books and newspapers in 1739 using a type face that his German readers could more easily read. In 1743, Sauer published the first German-language Bible to be printed in North America (Trinity Lutheran Church now stands on the site of Christopher Sower's printing establishment. 5300 Germantown Avenue).

German American origins in PA are least subject to  internet search. Much is still in German, or not digitally available. Any search of a figure like Peter Miller or Christopher Saur omits more than it reveals. These fingernail sketches are meant to hit the high spots of the figures actions.

Official depositories of documents were almost unknown among the Mennonites of America until the first half of the 20th century. The descendants of  Mennonite  immigrants 1683-1873 from Switzerland, South Germany, and France kept few if any records in their aftermath. Even membership lists could be considered evidence of pride. Written minutes of conference meetings were not kept until about 1905. Few records or  correspondence letters before 1870 were preserved. One early exception is the Alms books of the Skippack (1738- ) congregation  of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. The important records of the first Mennonite congregation in North America,  the Germantown congregation (1708 ff.),  still extant in 1835, have since disappeared.

Archives. Harold Bender

 

It is unusual that a family not Mennonite should be mentioned in its earliest documents of 1700-1750  as is the case of Hans George Reiff (1659-1726) and his wife Anna, daughter of a Dutch Church minion. First they were associated by proximity with Mennonites. Reiff’s land bordered his Mennonite cousin, Hans Reiff, from Wadenzwil,  Most Mennonite Reiffs came from this canton outside Zurich, but Hans George was German Reformed in faith. His land is used as a legal boundary to establish Michael Ziegler’s property in 1717, which proximity but more his good character are the likely cause that Mennonite Pastor Ziegler asked Hans George to sign as a witness of the Mennonite Trust of 1725, where his name appears.

The name of his wife Anna appears on the first page of the Skippack Alms Book in 1738.  Few or no membership lists, letters or minutes of meetings were kept by Mennonites before 1870, so the Skippack Alms Book is among the first of such.  Anna’s (1662-1753) name appears in 1738 for a gift of ten shillings, which it seems likely to have been given for a new building and cemetery for the Salford Mennonite congregation which had become separate from the Skippack Church by then. A deed of trust was issued to trustees of the Salford and Franconia congregations 25 Jan 1738 (Wenger, 16 and James Y. Heckler in the History of Lower Salford Township (1888) p 105. Heckler says that the deed given by Henry Ruth for ten acres of land was made by lease and release, October the 4^th and 5^th 1738 for a meetinghouse and also to be used as “a burial place for the burying of all such persons they shall allow.” Anna Marie Reiff’s gift was prophetic since she was herself interred in that cemetery in 1753.

This funeral has become a magnet for several different atrocities and in different ways, for it was the most widely celebrated event, involving a funeral oration and extensive notes by the Lutheran pastor Henry Muhlenberg, a profane epicede by the unhappy organist of Muhlenbergs’ church, Gottlieb Mittelberger, who wrote afterward of the proceedings in his disgruntled Journey to Pennsylvania, and of Mennonite historian John Ruth’s use of it as a pretext of the modern reconciliation of Lutheran and Mennonite.

Henry Muhlenberg arrived in New Providence or Trappe in 1742, about 8 miles in his reckoning from Salford. His belief in the all sufficiency of faith enabled other positive aspects of his character, which were many. He was able both to befriend beliefs while at the same time discriminate his own, hence he preached in churches among the English and the Germans, Baptists, Mennonites, Reformed. Muhlenberg’s Journals, extant and translated, kept assiduously, describe many of difficulties he encounters in his relations with people and other faiths in that lawless environ.

 The 350 pages of these Journals, with the Correspondence from Jan 1742 when he begins to Jan 1753 when he writes of this funeral are first primary sources of those years. Sometimes what they omit is as important as what they develop. For instance he at no time mentions the organist who worked at his Augustus Lutheran Church in Trappe for 3 years, Gottlieb Mittelberger, the same who published after returning to Europe the Journey to Pennsylvania (1756) who seems to describe the details of this funeral. In those years Muhlenberg gives much account of Zinzendorf’s Herrhutters,  Baumann’s Newborns, Mennonites, Baptists, Lawless and not. He writes with integrity and authenticity of himself and others who of course being a pastor he sees often in extremity.

In the rough decade before this funeral of which we speak he had conducted a great many  Since he singlehandedly built the Lutheran presence in that area

Music in New Jersey, 1655-1860: A Study of Musical Activity and Musicians in ...

By Charles H. Kaufman, 32 takes mittelbeger at face value and believes he delivered organs when he did not , but is puzzled that Muhlenberg never mentions him at all! It is likely he is omitted out of courtesy since he is such a bore.

This family was known and respected by their Mennonite neighbors even while they were embroiled in difficulties with the religionists of the German Reformed church whose first  building was on their land and whose elders sent the Reiff son, Jacob, to Holland on a fund raising tour along with their pastor Weiss. this voyage of a year and a half ended badly when Weiss abandoned the mission and refused to take the collected funds with him on his return. As soon as he returned to Philadelphia he moved to New York.

their sons and daughter’s names occur variously in lawsuits, as with Jacob (1698-1782) , a disputed scion of the German Reformed Reiff Church, first such in that area, of 1732 and 33, and Conrad (1696-1777) of the Newborn of Oley in Mittelberger’s Journey to Pennsylvania, who in the end returns to a faith more less in the Moravian fashion, but also both mother, sons and daughter appear in Muhlenberg’s episode of Anna’s funeral and burial in the Mennonite cemetery at Salford (1753) which funeral is also celebrated by Mittleberger’s Journey (1756) for its own sake and because he was employed by Pastor Muhlenberg as organist at that time, and this is not all for the first German Reformed church