"This volume is not intended to be a complete record of the families mentioned. The sole purpose is to provide the information on the emigrating generation from the German church records, with enough substantiating evidence from Pennsylvania records to attempt to prove the connection"--Introd. p. xvii.

The lists making up this remarkable work try to identify German emigrants in their homeland and in Pennsylvania. Thus they are cited with reference to manumission records, parish registers, passports, and other papers of German and Swiss provenance, and noted again, where possible, with reference to an equivalent range of Pennsylvania source materials, notably church records, wills, and tax lists. The materials antedating immigration often indicate causes, dates of emigration, the emigrant's occupation, his dates of birth and marriage, place of birth and residence, and names of family members, sometimes with lines of descent for several generations.

Each family group record in this impressive volume includes the name(s) of the immigrant(s), ship arrival data, European villages of origin (including earlier Swiss residences where given), data on each family from the European church registers, as well as information on many of the 628 families after their arrival in America. (690pp. illus. index. hardcover. Author, 1992.)

"An authentic history, from original sources, of their suffering during several centuries before and especially during the two centuries following the Protestant Reformation, and of their slow migration, moved by those causes, during the last mentioned two hundred years, westward in quest of religious freedom and their happy relief in the Susquehanna and Schuylkill valleys in the new world; with particular reference to the German-Swiss Mennonites or Anabaptists, the Amish and other non-resistant sects"--Title page.

The emigrants from the Langenselbold area settled mainly in Berks County, Pennsylvania. A large group settled in Lower Heidelberg Township. Also includes emigrants who went to New York in 1710.

This is a collection of articles pertaining to the European origins of Pennsylvania German immigrants which originally appeared in the magazine "Pennsylvania Folklife," successor to "The Pennsylvania Dutchman." Virtually all the emigrants mentioned in this work are cited with reference to church, parish, and provincial records and other records located in the archival repositories of the old Palatinate and adjoining provinces in southwest Germany; and these emigrants are cited again, where possible, with reference to a corresponding range of Pennsylvania source materials, notably church records, wills, and tax lists. In addition, names of emigrants are collated with Strassburger and Hinke's celebrated "Pennsylvania German Pioneers," from which are drawn dates of arrival, names of ships, and other evidence of immigration.

In 1700, some 250,000 white and black inhabitants populated the thirteen American colonies, with the vast majority of whites either born in England or descended from English immigrants. By 1776, the non-Native American population had increased tenfold, and non-English Europeans and Africans dominated new immigration. Of all the European immigrant groups, the Germans may have been the largest. Aaron Spencer Fogleman has written the first comprehensive history of this eighteenth-century German settlement of North America. Utilizing a vast body of published and archival sources, many of them never before made accessible outside of Germany, Fogleman emphasizes the importance of German immigration to colonial America, the European context of the Germans' emigration, and the importance of networks to their success in America