ROOTS & BRANCHES

It was a Facebook post last month that put me on the trail of one last Christmas present to myself.

The post was touting a book titled The Pursuit and it didn’t take long to realize it had been written by a distant cousin about a mutual German immigrant family—in his case, his surname line!—that begins with Peter Ruth of Walhausen, Germany, the teeter-totter of which was his family’s voyage to the New World aboard the 1733 sailing of the ship Pennsylvania Merchant.

The author, Jim Ruth, tells the story of his nuclear family’s 1983 visit to western Berks County for a 250^th anniversary reunion as the starting point toward learning more about his own genealogy.

Ruth traces his direct ancestry along with some collateral lines from the point of immigration—now almost 300 years ago!—to the present generation. He has researched some intriguing, as well as tragic, military encounters that folks in his relation have experienced (I was also interested that he had some journalists in his ancestry!).

One thing that Ruth appears to have grasped immediately was that knowledge about the 1733 voyage of the Pennsylvania Merchant is far more detailed than nearly every other 18^th century trip to America.

That’s because not just one but two immigrant narratives from this time period exist—offering a bounty of first-hand information about the journey of the Ruth family.

Given that less than two-dozen total such narratives from the 1700s have survived, Ruth was able to give many details that for other families would be merely suppositions.

I was especially impressed with the detailed description of the final stages of the Pennsylvania Merchant’s 1733 voyage. I’m familiar with the two narratives of the voyage and for years have done a lecture “Germany to America: 18th Century Odyssey” but I kind of ignored what was right in front of me regarding that phase of the journey.

I’m intuiting that this was extra special to Jim Ruth since he lived for some years in Lewes, Delaware, the place where his ancestor’s ship entered Delaware Bay and engaged a local pilot to guide the ship past sandbars as the bay turned into the Delaware River on its way to Philadelphia.

In his chapter about Peter Ruth’s life before his emigration, Ruth’s first edition does suffer from a common confusion that the area of the emigrant’s residence was part of the Kingdom of Prussia.

In fact, this area was only part of Prussia for a short time after the defeat of Napoleon, long after Peter Ruth left. Instead, for most of the 1700s, it was part of the Duchy of Pfalz-Zweibruecken, then was incorporated into France during the Napoleonic period, and afterwards was an exclave of the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg in 1816, surrounded by Prussia but not part of it.

More complication than the average reader needs except that determining such noble jurisdictions can lead to the proper archives!

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The Pursuit: A Historical Biography of One Family’s Quest for Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness in America by Jim Ruth, Patriot Heritage Press (Frederick, MD: 2024), 224 pages.