A history of the family of German immigrants who came to Frederick County, Maryland and the house they built named from the city from which they came: Schifferstadt. The book details the life and times of the original family who built the home in the mid-1700s and details what remains of the stone house, the oldest residential building in Frederick, Maryland.

Wilhelm Wagner (1803-1877), son of Peter Wagner, was born in Dürkheim, Germany. He married Friedericke Odenwald (1812-1893). They had nine children. They emigrated and settled in Illinois. His brother, Julius Wagner (1816-1903) married Emilie M. Schneider (1820-1896). They had seven children. They emigrated and settled in Texas.

This is a definitive account of the land and the people of Old Monocacy in early Frederick County, Maryland. The outgrowth of a project begun by Grace L. Tracey and completed by John P. Dern, it presents a detailed account of landholdings in that part of western Maryland that eventually became Frederick County. At the same time it provides a history of the inhabitants of the area, from the early traders and explorers to the farsighted investors and speculators, from the original Quaker settlers to the Germans of central Frederick County. In essence, the book has a dual focus. First it attempts to locate and describe the land of the early settlers. This is done by means of a superb series of plat maps, drawn to scale from original surveys and based both on certificates of survey and patents. These show, in precise configurations, the exact locations of the various grants and lots, the names of owners and occupiers, the dates of surveys and patents, and the names of contiguous land owners. Second, it identifies the early settlers and inhabitants of the area, carefully following them through deeds, wills, and inventories, judgment records, and rent rolls. Finally, in meticulously compiled appendices it provides a chronological list of surveys between 1721 and 1743; an alphabetical list of surveys, giving dates, page reference--text and maps--and patent references; a list of taxables for 1733-34; and a list of the early German settlers of Frederick County, showing their religion, their location, dates of arrival, and their earliest records in the county. Winner of the 1988 Donald Lines Jacobus Award

In Citizens in a Strange Land, Hermann Wellenreuther examines the broadsides—printed single sheets—produced by the Pennsylvania German community. These broadsides covered topics ranging from local controversies and politics to devotional poems and hymns. Each one is a product of and reaction to a particular historical setting. To understand them fully, Wellenreuther systematically reconstructs Pennsylvania’s print culture, the material conditions of life, the problems German settlers faced, the demands their communities made on the individual settlers, the complications to be overcome, and the needs to be satisfied. He shows how these broadsides provided advice, projections, and comment on phases of life from cradle to grave.

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.

Title of the first 10 volumes of the series is Germans to America : lists of passengers arriving at U.S. ports 1850-1855.

The lists making up this remarkable work try to identify German emigrants in their homeland and in Pennsylvania. Thus they are cited with reference to manumission records, parish registers, passports, and other papers of German and Swiss provenance, and noted again, where possible, with reference to an equivalent range of Pennsylvania source materials, notably church records, wills, and tax lists. The materials antedating immigration often indicate causes, dates of emigration, the emigrant's occupation, his dates of birth and marriage, place of birth and residence, and names of family members, sometimes with lines of descent for several generations.