Until two weeks ago when I got onto the Sasser List, I had never heard of the idea that our Sasser ancestors were from Germany. I kept seeing references to this idea while at the same time, no one mentioned the fact there were Sasser's in America and England prior to the time some kinfolks were saying our ancestors came here from Germany. All I wanted to do was simply point out these facts and ask why they were being ignored. But I ended up having to "defend" these facts. Doug Sherman says that even though "we know there were Sassers in Somerset County, (Maryland) and these Sassers had names that show up in North Carolina. However, I don't see how we can say that these are *our* Sassers without supporting documentation." The point I was trying to make was that I nor any of the researchers I had hear of before now has seen any records stating we are of German ancestry. On the other hand, the 13 original colonies were ENGLISH colonies, founded by and for English/British settlers. There were pockets of foreigners but these were few and far between and most have been well documented. I am a descendant of one of the very few German settlements in the South. Ralph Mauelshagen wrote that "Have you considered that there may just have been some movement between Germany and England over the past 500 years? In a somewhat "scientific" approach, if you find someone in England in the early 1700's, you can automatically assume he is British until shown otherwise. Ditto for the English colonies: if they settled in an English colony, then we can assume they were British until shown otherwise. It sounds to me as though there are some of our kinfolks who are bound and determined to turn our Sasser ancestors into Germans, regardless of anything to the contrary. In other words, the burden of proof here is to prove otherwise. There were SASSER's in SEVERAL scattered counties in England in the 1600's; Sasser's were in Maryland by the 1600's; by the year 1742, there were still Sasser's coming to America from ENGLAND. In record after record, there is only an ENGLISH connectin. WHERE is any record on GERMAN Sasser's? Ralph also told me that folks of German ancestry now outnumber folks of English ancestry according to the 1980 US census. May well be, especially considering the flood of immigrants into the United States starting in the 1850's and 1860's. Huge numbers of immigrants in St. Louis, freshly arrived from Germany, were enrolled into the yankee army in Missouri to fight against native-born folks whose ancestors had founded the nation. But none of that concerns us in this discussion. We are talking about folks who settled in the English colonies in the early 1700's--not the waves of immigrants who came to the United States long after it was formed. The vast majority of folks who had settled in the 13 colonies before independence were British. England did not encourage foreigners to settle in HER colonies. I would rather lay aside this debate and get on with some real family history. Thanks for all the good comments I have been getting directly, especially the new records on Sasser's in Somerset County, Maryland. Your cuz, Robert Earl Woodham ------------------------------