Emigrants from the Principality of Hessen-Hanau, Germany, 1741-1767

Description

One of author Clifford Neal Smith’s primary goals has been to rescue buried data pertaining to 18th and 19th-century German emigration and make it available to researchers. Smith’s German-American Genealogical Research Monographs, from which we have reprinted this booklet, was an important instrument for achieving that objective. The author derived his list of emigrants for Hessen-Hanau from a register of the Privy Council of that former principality, which he discovered in the Staatsarchiv, Marburg, Germany. These passengers departed for America (principally Pennsylvania), as well as for Hungary, Lithuania, Pomerania, and Russia. (These Eastern European Germans should not be dismissed by U.S. researchers because their descendants may have taken part in the great Eastern European exodus of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.)

For the researcher’s convenience, the author has arranged this booklet in two parts: (1) the body of the work consists of a chronologically arranged list of emigrants as they appeared in the original register; (2) the balance is an annotated index of all persons named in the register with their ages, ship traveled on, date of embarkation, and any other information the author could attribute to them from Strassburger & Hinke’s Pennsylvania German Pioneers.