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roger.pape
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Joined: 17 Mar 2009
Posts: 414
Location: Liverpool, NY

PostPosted: Tue Feb 26, 2019 10:25 am    Post subject: Ancestral Home Reply with quote

Where did the various families that settled in Concordia live back in Germany?
While most of them were farmers, they tended to live in small villages. They would gather together in a village with their modest sized farms spreading out from that center. This explains why there are so many small villages in Germany. By contrast the US rectangular land survey system laid out the property in larger plots and the farmers would tend to build their home somewhere in the middle of their land. In some cases homes in the US would cluster together at the intersection of the corners of their land. Roads were built along the property lines and communities would begin at some of these corners.

In a community like Concordia one finds a number of families that came from the same German village. Families that immigrated would often group together on the same voyage to the US and when they arrived in the US would often settle in the same area. The other reason is chain migration where people would later come to the same area where their relatives/neighbors/friends had already settled. The Frerking family is a good example of both of these reasons. Four of the boys came with their uncle Friedrich Dierking and other relatives on the 1837 voyage of the ship Burmah. The rest of the Frerking family came to Concordia some years later to join them.

When tracing ones family back to the "old country" it is helpful to know the specific village where they lived because the vital records of births, marriages, and deaths were saved in the local churches of those communities. So knowing names of ones family or relatives that came from a specific village would be helpful in locating these records.

I intend to start a number of postings in this forum describing the villages from which these early settlers came. While tracing my family history I have identified some of these villages. It would be helpful if others could post information about similar families and villages.
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