Hello Nina, God sent you to this family and I will be forever grateful for all you do to help us. This is wonderful information! I am thrilled to death over all of it. I have been muddling along working on our family since 1975....... that is a very long time. Finally it appears we may get out of the USA with documentation. You have made my day! Thanks, Flora ----- Original Message ----- From: "Nina Harkey" <nhark@tc3net.com> To: <HARKEY-L@rootsweb.com> Sent: Saturday, August 10, 2002 3:27 PM Subject: [HARKEY-L] Johannes Herche (how he possibly got to the US) > As some of you know, I was in Germany last spring and included a side trip to the Sterbfitz area. I had promised some information for the list, which has been slow in coming together. Today I was on the phone with Karl-Heinz Herche who has been kind enough to work with us and offer us all the information he has in his data. (We also have information he is interested in, so it's a mutual thing) The conversation also presented some new information I did not yet have. The direct ancestor of Karl-Heinz Herche is Hartmann Herche, younger brother of Johannes Jacob Herche. > > To begin with, it seems we do indeed have the correct ancestor, Johannes Jacob Herche, b. Sterbfritz, 12 August 1708. His siblings are as follows: > > CONRAD HERCHE (Herrche, Herge) born August 23, 1657 in Sterbfritz, Hessen - Nassau, Preußen, and died December 27, 1732 in Sterbfritz Hessen - Nassau. He married EULALIA (PAUL - PAULI) PFAUL June 06, 1695 in Sterbfritz, Hessen-Nassau, Preußen, Germany, daughter of HARTMANN PFAUL and EVA MUTH. She was born March 17, 1675 in Sterbfritz, Hessen - Nassau. > More About CONRAD HERCHE: > Fact 1: August 23, 1657, Christened > More About CONRAD HERCHE and EULALIA PFAUL: > Marriage: June 06, 1695, Sterbfritz, Hessen-Nassau, Preußen, Germany > Children of CONRAD HERCHE and EULALIA PFAUL are: > i. BARBARA5 HERCHE1, b. August 15, 1696, Sterbfritz, Hessen - Nassau, > ii. ANNA MARIA HERCHE1, b. February 07, 1699, Sterbfritz, Hessen - Nassau1. > iii. MARGRETHA HERCHE1, b. February 01, 1702, Sterbfritz, Hessen - Nassau1. > iv. ELISABETHA HERCHE1, b. March 21, 1706, Sterbfritz, Hessen - Nassau1. > v. JOHANNES JACOB HERCHE1, b. August 12, 1708, Sterbfritz, Hessen - Nassau1. > vi. HARTMANN HERCHE1, b. March 20, 1711, Sterbfritz, Hessen - Nassau, Preußen; d. May 02, 1775, Mottgers, Hessen1; m. CATHARINA AILGET/EILGERT1, February 16, 17411; b. March 31, 1711, Schwarzenfels, Hessen1; d. January 04, 1784, Mottgers, Hessen. > More About HARTMANN HERCHE and CATHARINA AILGET/EILGERT: > Marriage: February 16, 17411 > vii. EVA ELISABETH HERCHE1, b. November 08, 1713, Sterbfritz, Hessen - Nassau, Preußen. > viii. ANNA HERCHE1, b. July 13, 1716, Sterbfritz, Hessen - Nassau, Preußen. > > There had been talk about having Clemens Schreiber, a local historian living in Schlüchtern, read the area church books for us. The goal was to get as much information about Johannes as possible. Karl-Heinz has already had this done a few years back and has all the information in hand which he will be mailing to me shortly. While there is a wealth of ancestral information, there is little or no information on Johannes, none that would be helpful to us in getting him "across the pond" to the colonies. Church books reveal the following about Johannes: > *Birth date > *Christening date and sponsors names > *Confirmation > After that, there are no further records about Johannes. What is noteworthy about this is that after the age of 13 there are no entries for him, no death and no marriage. The fact that there is no death entry implies that the towns people lost track of him and had no idea of his whereabouts, whether he married and where and when he dies. He just disappeared in the sense that after he left the area no one there had any further contact with him. > > Karl-Heinz presents some history of the area at the time. During this period the area was very depressed and poor. This was post robber baron purge and pillage, drought and famine. The Duke of the area was looking for a way to raise money for the depressed region. At this time, England need man power to patrol the colonies (a national guard of sorts) and they did not have enough man power to cover all the territories. They "rented" manpower from areas of Europe and would pay kingdoms "per head" of bodies they could have. There was a notice sent through the Sterbfritz area for volunteers. Several men from the area joined. This meant they received the appropriate papers to migrate to England, become an "English Soldier" and be shipped to the colonies. He feels Johannes was one of those that volunteered. If this is indeed the case, as seems very plausible right now, we will never find Johannes on a Ship Manifest as he was transported to the Colonies aboard a British ! Tr! > oops transport. He estimates the year to be somewhere in the range of 1722 to very latest 1730. With Johannes being born 1708, by 1730 he would have been 22 yrs old. Karl-Heinz assumed him to have left earlier than that as there is no record of marriage for him, by that age he would have most likely married already. So anytime after the age of 16-18 (even at the age of 14 he could have enlisted) would have been when he chose to "enlist". With Johannes gone (the 1st son) all the land and real estate went to the 2nd son, Hartmann. > > Karl-Heinz has an extensive database of the ancestors of Johannes and Hartmann. His records go back to round about the year 1200 which he will also be sending me (actually, I think he said it was already in the mail). His database places the family in the Hessen area back to that date. > > The family is a noble one, full of judges, heads of church, etc. They were Knights and Barons. There is indeed a family crest (not one that you can order on the net, but a real documented one in the Germanic archives) that he has a copy of and will provide as well. The lineage ultimately traces back to Kaiser Karl der Grosse (Charlemagne) although Karl-Heinz says he is working on the documents to make it all official. According to the crest he has it was this nobility that the HERCHE lineage is connected to and the house that granted the crest. Another direct German relative is Heinrich Lübke, president of Germany 1959-1969. I will have more specific information to post once I have Karl-Heinz's data in hand. > > Now I guess we need to look into Hessian Soldier records and see if we can find anything to support Karl-Heinz's theory of Johannes' enlistment. So far it is just a theory, but makes sense. > > I also have a scanned image of additional names in the tree that Karl-Heinz sent me. For some reason not everyone I emailed a copy to received it, either at all or in a form that could not be accessed. I will convert it all to text and post those names as well, to the list so everyone has a copy. > > > > > > ==== HARKEY Mailing List ==== > Have you heard about the website for Big Uncle Cemetery, San Saba TX. You'll find it interesting If any of your Harkey's went to Texas. > http://www.rootsweb.com/~txssaba/uncle.html > > ============================== > To join Ancestry.com and access our 1.2 billion online genealogy records, go to: > http://www.ancestry.com/rd/redir.asp?targetid=571&sourceid=1237 > >