Three Rivers
Hudson~Mohawk~Schoharie
History From America's Most Famous Valleys

Early Eighteenth Century Palatine Emigration
A British Government Redemptioner Project to Manufacture Naval Stores
by Walter Allen Knittle, Ph.D.
Department of History
College of the City of New York
Published Philadelphia, 1937

Introduction to Appendices

The Palatine Immigration was so involved financially with the British government that many lists of these immigrants were drawn up. Most of these lists, heretofore unpublished, were turned up in the course of this research. They constitute a most valuable addition to genealogical information, since the most difficult problem confronting the genealogists is that part of the link which establishes just when the colonial ancestor arrived. Heretofore, the largest list of these emigrants published contained only 6,000 people. The lists given here double that total.

For convenience in referring to the lists, they have been arranged in this order under these headings.

    1. The Kocherthal Party--1709 Emigration
    2. The First Board of Trade List of Palatines in London (May 6, 1709)
    3. The Embarkation Lists from Holland
    4. The Roman Catholic Palatines Returned to Holland
    5. The New York Subsistence List
    6. The Simmendinger Register
    7. The Pennsylvania Palatine Lists
    8. The Petition List of Palatines in North America
    9. The Irish Palatine List
Each list has been briefly described under its heading and the source of the information given. All information in the lists has been included, except where otherwise stated as in Appendix B. No attempt has been made to reconcile the spellings between any two of the lists as it was felt that each record had best stand upon its own merits. There is a great deal of variation in the spelling of the names among the various lists,which may be accounted for by the eighteenth century habit of spelling a word the way it was pronounced, a habit now lost but of some merit, and by the difficulties of list-makers writing names in a language often strange to them. The latter difficulty is not so valid with the Palatine list-makers, who were in most instances German or Dutch, the latter not unrelated to German. Perhaps the worst difficulty was the illiteracy of a number of the Palatines, who may be presumed to have been able to pronounce but not spell their names. The use of the feminine ending "in" at the end of the women's family names should not be confusing to the casual reader of the lists; it simply denotes that the female in question was unhampered by any present male attachment, she being either an unmarried girl or a widow.

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