Scottish ancestor John Hanna served in Revolutionary War

For those of my Ringer relatives pining to join the Sons or Daughters of the American Revolution, this may be your chance!  Ancestor John Issac Hanna (1748-1838) is an authentic American Revolutionary War Soldier.

John Hanna was the father of 

Robert Hanna (1792-1870) who was the father of 

Adeline Hanna (1820-1902) who was the mother of 

Joseph Ringer (1860-1938) who was the father of
George Ringer (1888-1964) who was my grandfather.

John Hanna is buried near the 6th tee at the Black Rock Golf Club in Hagerstown, MD.

John apparently served as a private under Captain John Paxton.  From an unverified source on the internet:

During the Revolutionary War, a battalion was newly raised in the vicinity of his home. John was elected, by ballot, Captain of Company D, 2nd Battalion, York County Militia. Among other engagements, the Battalion participated in the battle of Brandywine and of Germantown. Captain John was severely wounded in the latter battle.   Source:  http://www.uh.edu/~jbutler/gean/captjohnpaxton.html

Stephen Colbert connection?

A quick follow up to my previous post.  Apparently one of Ulrich Zug's fellow passengers on the good ship James Goodwill that arrived in Philadelphia in 1727 was one Hans Diebold Ledermann, who happens to be the seventh great grandfather of political satirist Stephen Colbert.  This is confirmed in an excerpt of a book entitled "Faces of America:  How 12 Extraordinary People discovered their pasts," by Henry Louis Gates.  I haven't read the book yet, but I do intend to and I will and share any additional information I discover that might be of interest.  There very well may be other connections to Stephen Colbert as not only did some of his relatives come across on the same ship at the same time (and likely were from the same area in Germany) but the son of Hans Diebold Ledermann relocated to the same part of Maryland (Frederick County) as many of our ancestors.  In 1728, four different families arrived in Philadelphia on the ship Mortonhouse who would all later become direct Ringer ancestors, so it's safe to say that the people who immigrated from Germany on these ships at that time were fairly friendly with each other.  Were Colbert's ancestors connected with ours in some way?  We'll have to explore that.

Another interesting tidbit from the excerpt I found in this book is that the law that required new immigrants to pledge an allegiance to the king was passed in 1727, due to "...a deep suspicion of non-English speaking immigrants..." and the men from the ship James Goodwill were only the second group of immigrants to have to agree to the pledge before entering the colonies.

Transatlantic voyages of Ringer ancestors in 1727

I was in Philadelphia the past few days and spent some time researching the immigration into the United States of a number of our relatives who arrived here from Germany in the late 1720's.  The following is a great description of the challenges they faced prior to emigrating, on their voyage and once they arrived in America.  Our direct relative Ulrich Zug and his family were on board the ship "James Goodwill" which arrived in Philadelphia on September 27, 1727, and which is described in this article.  Several more of our direct ancestors arrived the next year on the ship "Mortonhouse."  

As a reference for the time period, Philadelphia was a bustling town of about 7,000 inhabitants in 1727 and Ben Franklin was a young (21 years old), new resident of the city who hadn't even started his newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette.  It would be another 49 years before George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and others assembled in Philadelphia to write the Declaration of Independence. 

The ship James Goodwill docked September 27, 1727, at Philadelphia from Rotterdam with fifty four Palatine families aboard. The ships master David Crockatt submitted a list of the names of the heads of the families to the provincial council on which he also recorded the number of adult men and a the total number of living persons in the family. Fifty three men took the oath of allegence before the governor and council that same day (Strassberger 10 ) after a long hard journey, these Swiss-German families gratefully disembarked to begin building a better life in a new land. 

This shipload of families joined a steady stream of German Palatine's coming from the Rhinish Palatineate. The Palatinate duchys had been a fruitful area peopled with hard-working farmers. First the thirthy year war desolated the land. For another thirty years bad weather decimated the crops and froze the orchards. Finally the changing political attitudes led to the plundering of the poor serfs as petty prices and dukes sought money to pay the bills for their wars and for their decadent and luxurious courts ( Billington 97-8 ). And in the Palatinate, the working people suffered and starved. 

William Penn viewed his colony as a sanctuary for any oppressed people, not just for Quakers, so he wrote brochures and sent representatives to Europe to invite the suffering German Palatinates to emigrate to Pennsylvania (Billington 100 ). The German Palatinates began the first of three major waves of migration. The first major flow of people began in 1680 and lasted until 1708. Members of dissident religions in the Palatinate had also emigrated to England to escape religious persecution, and in the years 1710 to 1720 this group left England for Pennsylvania. The third wave lasted from 1720 to 1730 when Germans and Swiss-Germans left the Palatinate directly for the American colonies (Strassberger xivxv). The ship James Goodwill left Rotterdam as part of the third and largest wave of German emigrants. 

The difficult six month jouney began in the spring with the journey down the Rhine to Rotterdam. The Rhine boats were detained at each of the twenty six custom houses until it suited the custom house officials to examine the passengers and cargoes. The journey usually lasted four to six weeks during which time the passengers must pay their own living expenses over and above their fares. Many of them used most of their money before reaching Rotterdam. From Rotterdam the Germans sailed to an English port for the last stage of the journey. After a normal delay of two weeks, they embarked on the seven to 12 week voyage to the American colonies (Strassberger xxxiii-xxxv). Their difficulties and suffering on this journey cannot be minimized nor accurately described. 

The first obstacle for many German emigrants started in the Palatinate when unscrupulous agents charged exorbitant fees for information and services. The families sold everything they had to raise money for the trip, taking with them only the bare essentials packed in a trunk. Even those people who left Rotterdam in fairly solvent financial condition arrived in Pennsylvania almost destitute. 

Ships leaving for the american colonies were loaded with one hundred percent more passengers than they were designed to carry. The dense way the people were packed in, without proper food or water and with poor sanitary conditions, soon led to rampant diseases such as dysentery, typhoid, and smallpox. Children succumbed first to the ravages of diseases.The ships captains, worried about the reduction in paid passengers, soon settled on a formula. If a passenger died before the ship traveled half the distance to Pennsylvania , there would be no fare for the deceased. But if the passenger died past the halfway point, the family must still pay the full fare to America. Of course the captain determinewd the halfway point. The terrors brought on by frequent Atlantic storms aggravated the death rate. THe emigrants, generally unprepared for the hardships of many weeks on board ship, suffered both body and spirit.

Upon reaching Pennsylvania, the passengers again were delayed on board until a health officer could ascertain that no infectiuos diseases would be brought into Philidelphia. The end of the long journey to a home in a new land was in sight. The emigrants, who still had funds to pay their passage (or freight charge ) and the expenses of the journey or had relatives or friends in the colony to advance them the money, could disembark. the freight charges for each person amounted to six to ten louis d'ors. Since the value of each loui d'ors was about $4.50, the cost of passage for each person ranged from $27.00 to $45.00. Small children were figured as a half fare frieght charge. The emigrants without their passage money faced indentured servitude to pay off their debt. Even this situation represented hope for the future and a better life than they endured in the Palatinate. 

No accurate figures exist for the early years, but an estimated 15,000 German Palatines lived in the province of Pensylvania by 1730. When Governor Patrick Gordon took office in 1726 he exspressed concerns about such large numbers of foreiners coming to the colony who did not owe allegiance to the crown of Great Britain. As a result the provincial council devised a plan where all non-English emigrants must take an oath of allegiance to the King of Great Britain before disembarking from the arriving ships (Strassberger xx-xxi ). The first shipload of passengers where the men took the oath arrived Sept 21, 1727, six days before the ship James Goodwill.

Source:  http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/l/e/s/Michael-Lesher/WEBSITE-0001/UHP-0090.html