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For what seemed like an eternity, the violent sea sent wave upon wave crashing into the ship’s defiant hull, jostling the weary passengers packed within her hold. When, many days ago, these anxious Germans embarked from the port of Rotterdam on this Atlantic crossing, their hearts had been full of hope for a better life in the New World. Now, as sickness spread through the population of the vessel, their desire for a better life gave way to the far more modest aim of hanging on to what life they had.

One of those souls desperately clinging to life was Agnes Matz, lying on a wooden plank suspended between two chairs with only a folded blanket for bedding. Standing next to Agnes was her husband, Johann Georg, nervously rocking from side to side as he cradled their son Lorentz in his arms. Other women had gathered around to comfort his feverish wife and were dabbing away the sweat from her brow. Unsure of what more he could do to ease her suffering, Johann Georg’s only thought was to keep their baby plainly within sight at all times, to give Agnes strength and the will to fight through this sickness.

Surrounded by adults doing everything possible to make his mother more comfortable, five-year-old Georg sat attentively by her side, holding her feeble hand. Gently, he caressed the back of it while a vision came to him of his mother doing the same thing a year earlier when his sister was on her deathbed. Again and again, Georg whispered into his mother's ear the prayer she had taught him, hoping his words might carry the power to banish the sickness from her body. But it was not to be. Later that evening, Agnes Matz slipped away, her spirit ascending into the welcoming embrace of the Almighty.

This is my family history – the story of my Matz ancestors, beginning with those who precede me by eleven generations, going back more than four hundred years.  At first blush, one might dismiss this work as having no great significance, nor interest, to anyone outside my family tree. But perhaps upon further consideration you will come to realize that something similar to this could very well be your story, for it is a history shared by millions of Americans whose heritage can be traced back to the western German lands, from the Upper to the Lower Rhine, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

It was a time when the people of Württemberg, the Rhenish Palatinate, Baden, and Alsace endured the devastation of war and its blighted aftermath. A time when church and state were one and the same, and religious freedom consisted of only two choices: conform or flee. This was the age of European exploration and colonization, when regional powers such as England, Spain, France and the Dutch Republic ventured to foreign shores. Emigration by the German people, however, had not taken place at the behest of their government to colonize the New World; to the contrary, this was an exodus of the oppressed, desperate to flee the persecution and socioeconomic repression of the Old World. Protestants who followed the teachings of Martin Luther or John Calvin, Anabaptists who followed the teachings of Menno Simons – to America they came. 

To the City of Brotherly Love they came, in 1683: Mennonites from Krefeld in Westphalia, seeking a life of religious freedom. Along with their Quaker brethren, they established the settlement of Germantown, north of Philadelphia, on land purchased from William Penn. A quarter of a century later, a second group of Germans came to the Americas: refugees from the Palatinate, dispatched by England to establish a work colony in New York. But after twelve years of service to the crown with little to show for it, fifteen of these Palatine families chose to leave New York in search of more favorable land rights. They found what they were looking for in the Tulpehocken Valley of the Pennsylvania colony.

Before long, ships packed with human cargo were docking at Philadelphia at an alarming rate. With concerns mounting over the growing number of German-speaking migrants settling in the Pennsylvania Colony, the provincial council passed a law in 1727 requiring all immigrant men, upon arrival, to sign an oath of allegiance to the British crown. Records from the port of Philadelphia reveal that immigrants arrived first by the hundreds per year, and then by the thousands, reaching an eighteenth-century peak in the years 1749 through 1754. During this six-year period, more than 30,000 Germans and Swiss migrated to America, including my ancestors.

These immigrants brought with them a highly developed knowledge of farming, which they immediately applied to the fertile soil of eastern Pennsylvania. Homes and barns built in the architectural style of the old country began to appear across the region. They gave their new communities familiar names, borrowed from places they once knew; communities such as Manheim, Bern, Hanover, Hamburg, Strasburg and Heidelberg. The immigrants vigorously hunted the land, following the example set by their German forefathers: a tradition that lives on with many Pennsylvania Germans today. The immigrant men and their sons volunteered in state militias and the Continental Army, helping their adopted country win its independence. And, these German-speaking immigrants brought to Pennsylvania their brand of Christianity, as can be found today in Lutheran and Reformed churches throughout the commonwealth. 

The 100,000 or so German immigrants from the colonial period quickly adjusted to their new life in this welcoming new world full of promise, and in so doing, paved the way for the arrival of millions more in the 1800s. However, it would not be appropriate to say that these immigrants assimilated into the American way of life; instead, we should acknowledge that they, as much as any other ethnic group, played a meaningful role in defining the very essence of what it means to be an American.

Indeed, German immigrants and their descendants have contributed to the American experience in every conceivable way: entertainers such as the Marx Brothers, Ringling Brothers, John Philip Sousa, Clark Gable, and Doris Day; Presidents Grover Cleveland, Herbert Hoover, and Dwight D. Eisenhower; literary giants from John Steinbeck and Patricia Highsmith to Dr. Seuss; printer Christopher Sauer and painter Emanuel Leutze; countless entrepreneurs, including John Jacob Astor, H. J. Heinz, Milton Hershey, Carrie Marcus Neiman, Charles Pfizer, Levi Strauss, and Adolphus Busch; scientists such as Robert Oppenheimer, Linus Pauling, Maria Goeppert Mayer, and Albert Einstein; trailblazers Amelia Earhart and Neil Armstrong; infamous characters like George Armstrong Custer, Jimmy Hoffa, John Dillinger, and Bruno Hauptmann; and, numerous sports figures, including Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Honus Wagner (The “Flying Dutchman”), John Heisman, Max Baer, Jack Nicklaus, and Dale Earnhardt.

Today, more than 45 million U.S. citizens identify as German American, in whole or in part – a number that places the group at the very top of the list of ethnic groups categorized by ancestral country. 

From the humble beginnings of the 1683 Germantown Settlement, German immigrants and their descendants have long since reached every corner of the United States. But Pennsylvania still is, and since the early 1700s has always been, home to the largest per capita population. 

This is one of the many stories of how it all began.