ROOTS & BRANCHES

I’ve known Andy Hochreiter mostly as a top-notch DNA genealogist who write a column on the subject in the Mid-Atlantic Germanic Society’s Der Kurier quarterly journal.

Hochreiter has researched his own surname ancestry well into Germany but was interested in a Georg Hochreitter who arrived in Philadelphia aboard the ship John and Elizabeth in November 1754.

“I doubt that he’s a relative since mine arrived much later and settled in upstate New York,” Hochreiter said. “But it certainly piques my interest in early arrivals. I would like to further research him and think it parallels your family research in Pennsylvania.”

Hochreiter said Georg disappears after the Philadelphia records. “There’s not another Hochreit(t)er until the 1830 census with the appearance of Bartholomew Hochreiter,” according to Hochreiter. Bartholomew arrived in Philadelphia in 1824 and is well documented from there with passenger, naturalization, land and probate records.

Hochreiter had just skimmed the surface on Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org and what he came up with can be instructive to others.

All the records he found on those sites were to the Oath of Allegiance lists kept for the port of Philadelphia beginning in 1727, the best version of which is the published Pennsylvania German Pioneers, an electronic version of which is on Ancestry, although that electronic database does not include the signature volume, which has facsimiles (retraced and doctored up a bit) of lists of oath signers (although this likely won’t help him with Georg since the man signed with a mark).

A fair number of those arriving in Colonial times indeed aren’t found again—some may have died soon after arriving or were indentured to a stranger and didn’t really integrate into Pennsylvania German society after the indenture was over.

I recommend consulting the works of what I call “the quartet”—Annette K. Burgert, Henry Z Jones, Don Yoder and Werner Hacker to see if Georg’s immigrant origins (or those of any of his shipmates) have been determined.

Hochreiter also should use the late John T. Humphrey’s Pennsylvania Births series of books to try and see if Georg is found fathering children in the 1750s–1770s.  These volumes mostly contain church baptismal records, cover all the counties of southeastern Pennsylvania, which would have been the likely spots for Georg to settle down if he did survive any length of time.

I also recommended seeing if George survived until the first census in 1790—being sure to check under all sorts of spelling variants / translations of the name (such as Highritter, for example). This would pinpoint him to a county and likely a township.

Another database that might help on Ancestry is “Pennsylvania Tax and Exoneration Lists, 1768–1801.” These are state tax lists, and most counties also have survivals of county tax lists, although fewer are online.