Here’s wishing everyone a safe and happy Independence Day!
In thinking about the day this year, after a trip to Saratoga, NY last summer, I find it rather interesting to reflect on my Hessian relatives. So, a quick sidetrack from the American Civil War today…
Sure, I have my fair share of ancestors who were in the Continental Line, State militias, etc, and even civilian Patriots who gave a lot (the Moore line of eastern Md. was particularly generous) of tobacco to the cause, but I find the story of the Hessians rather unique in relation to American Independence. After all, these people came over to help suppress the “rebellion” (and no, they weren’t “Godless Hessians”/aka “the boogeymen” as so often portrayed in “Rev War memory,” but were Lutherans with firm attachments to the church). Anyway, my relatives in the Hesse-Hanau regiment came across in 1776, entered Quebec, and soon began the march South. After passage along Lake Champlain and into New York, my Hessian kin were soon POWs at Saratoga (a family story recorded by a grandson of one of my Hessian kin documented the capture taking place “while straggling from camp by American Cavalry”).
Anyone who reads of the accounts of Hessian POWs can appreciate the strange circumstances that they endured. By late in the war, their circumstances were particularly poor. By that time, one of my two direct ancestors had escaped from the Hessian Barracks near Charlottesville and had integrated into the population in the Blue Ridge. The other (Christian Strohl) was in Reading, Pa. in 1782 and apparently finding it more to his advantage, sold himself into the indenture of a Pa. militiaman (who also actually happened to be from Ruppenheim in Hesse-Hanau and had family ties with the Strohl family… curiously unusual, but clearly fortunate for Christian Strohl). Not long after selling himself, he accompanied the family to the central Shenandoah Valley (which, conveniently, was a great place for people of Germannic origin… since so many spoke the language there), did his time, married his “owner’s” daughter, and began raising his own family in the Valley. Clearly, Strohl could offer a very different take on the meaning of American Independence and his new life as part of that history.
Judith Mace
July 22, 2009
In your July 4 articles, you wrote about Christian Strohl. Would this be Christian Strole b 31 Aug 1754 Rumpenheim, Hessen, Germany d mar 1841 Page Virginia married Elizabeth Kiser.
Line:
Christian, Johann Peter Strole, Johann Conrad Strohl
I’ve just begun researching this side of my family, Christian Strole was my 4 X great grandfather.
Please email me at sosimplejam@yahoo.com
Judy
cenantua
August 25, 2009
Judy, Yes, that’s the one. Christian’s son, Jacob, is my fifth great grandfather.
Robert
Gordon Callison
December 3, 2009
I have a friend whose father was born in 1928 in the loft of a one room log home a few miles north of Corning, New York. The structure was originally built in 1777, and I am trying to find out how the Hessian soldier came to be in this area? Gordy Callison
Gordon Callison
December 3, 2009
Oops!! Failed to mention that the log home that was built in 1777, was built by several Hessian soldiers. That part is a known fact. But how those Hessians ended up in the mountains north of Corning is a mystery. Gordy Callison