300 YEARS IN AMERICA: Family Founders of Germanna, VA 1714

2^nd GGP: GLOVER/MYERS  (Shriver Family)

Family Founders of First Germanna Colony, Virginia and 

Germantown, Virginia

In a previous post we met our 9th great grandparents (Bates' family line) who founded Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1683.  A generation later, German ancestors from the Glover family line became part of a recruitment effort to tap the potential of Virginia mineral reserves, settling  first in Germanna, and then moving  nearby to establish Germantown, Virginia before the families spread out westward through the Piedmont and over the Blue Ridge Mountains to West Virginia. 

This year marks the 300th anniversary of the 1714 emigration to Virginia by this group of families from the mining region of Siegen located in west-central Germany state of Nordrhein-Westfalen.  Recruited as skilled miners for proposed silver deposits in the Shenandoah Valley, the First Colony men instead spent their first two years in America as farmers, providing backcountry frontier defense as Rangers at the westernmost outpost of the expanding settlements. 

Fort at Germanna, VA

Their early service to Lt. Governor Alexander Spotswood prepared the way for what would be one of the first colonial iron mining industries (not silver). By 1718, dissatisfied with leasing their properties, many of the Germanna families moved about 40 miles north to claim an 1800-acre parcel of land that they distributed evenly among themselves. They called their new home Germantown.  (PLAT: Fauquier County's Licking Run ran through each of their properties.)

PLAT: Germantown, VA

Among the 12 original First Colony families who moved to Germantown were the maternal ancestors of Isaac Glover's wife, Mary Catherine Myers, including 1714 immigrants:
John Spilman and his wife, Mary (daughter of Phillip & Elizabeth Fischbach).
Many of the Germanna families were already kin and, within a generation, most were related by marriages.  Mary's six Fischbach siblings married into the Richter, Haeger, Otterback, and Brumbach pioneer families.  Although it is believed that Mary's parents died during their first year in Germanna, the siblings remained closely united and most lived out their lives in Germantown.  But by the time of the Revolutionary War, families had grown and scattered, leaving the small rural settlement behind. 
8th GGParents, Mary (Fischbach) and John Spilman were the parents of Alice Spilman who married a later immigrant from the Baden-Wuerttemberg region of Germany named Jacob Keckley.  From there the German family line continued with Shriver, merging with the English Horner family that led to Tazwell Myers' daughter, Mary Catherine as wife of Isaac Glover, my 2nd GGParents.  ~The genealogical trail from Siegen, Germany to Germanna & Germantown, Virginia to Alvy, West Virginia.
For more background information see:
http://germannafirstcolony.org/ & http://www.germanna.org/

NOTE: Although the genealogical facts are sometimes inconsistent and confusing, there are a number of primary sources that reveal a detailed historical story of the people and times of Germanna as shown in the following sites:

• http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~george/johnsgermnotes/germhist.html
  (John Blankenbaker's series of Short Notes on GERMANNA History based on dedicated research about Germanna and its people)
• http://www.werelate.org/wiki/Person:Phillip_Fischbach_%281%29  (based on Germanna Record No. 5: Ancestry & Descendants of the Nassau-Siegen Immigrants to Virginia 1714 - 1750, Pages 145 - 168 with details on Phillip Fischbach and his descendants)