ROOTS & BRANCHES

A couple of weeks ago “Roots & Branches” examined the legacy of Annette K. Burgert, an expert at finding the European villages of origin for Pennsylvania German immigrants.

Today, as we continue to work our way through what constitutes a “core collection” of Pennsylvania German genealogy resources, it’s time to talk about an expert documenting the emigration of people in the 1700s from the German states.

Which means it’s time to talk about the late Werner Hacker, who spent his working years as director of the Federal Republic of Germany’s national railway system.

Perhaps that should his “official working years,” since Hacker lived into his 90s and spent his “retirement” combing through the archives of southwestern Germany for evidence of people leaving those many then-independent German states in the 18^th century.

In the process, Hacker compiled more than a dozen books and monographs from specific areas stretching across the modern-day German states Baden-Württemberg, Saarland and Rhineland-Palatinate.

In these volumes, he documented the departure of thousands of families from their home states—many by finding references to manumissions from serfdom and payments of exit taxes for official permission to leave.

Most interesting to American readers are the many Pennsylvania German immigrants whose villages or parishes are identified in the records; but of equal or greater interest to historians is the fact that Hacker’s data confirms that emigration to America was a mere footnote (around 15 percent of the total) compared to departures heading east, particularly to the formerly Ottoman territories being absorbed into the empire of the Austrian Hapsburgs.

Hacker’s original German-language volumes can be found at genealogy libraries with major German genealogy collections. They are easy to use since the immigrants’ names are organized alphabetically, along with an abstract of information from the record being cited, its date, and also whether there is any correlating information from the Philadelphia oaths of allegiance given in the three-volume Pennsylvania German Pioneers set.

A consolidation of Hacker’s works, with briefer information, was published by Closson Press in 1994. It is titled Eighteenth Century Register of Emigrants from Southwest Germany (to America and Other Countries) is also found in many libraries and second-hand copies are available from various booksellers.

 The Closson Press edition gives names, villages of origin, year of emigration and the volume and emigrant number in Hacker’s original works.

When the “Roots & Branches” column next takes a look at the core collection, it will profile the biggest single volume on the bookshelf.