Contents and Introduction
Table of Contents and List of Illustrations & Maps
Dedication
Appreciation
Preface
The Names
Introduction
· Aerial map of original location of Bowman House and farmstead
Chapter I - The Bowmans in Bodigheim
· Records obtained by Friedrich Wollmershauser from church archives
Chapter II - Friends and Relatives in Bodigheim
· Records obtained by Friedrich Wollmershauser from Karlsruhe archives
Chapter III - Bodigheim, The Town
· Map of location of Bodigheim relative to Heidelberg, Karlsruhe and Frankfurt
Chapter IV - The Passage and Arrival in Philadelphia
· Picture of similar ship
· 1750 map of Philadelphia showing key streets
· Records showing passenger list on ship Patience with George’s signature
Chapter V - Life in Berks County, Pennsylvania
· Map showing distance and likely path from Philadelphia to farm location in Berks County
· Greenwich Township map showing farm location
· Aerial map of farm site
· Land purchase records
· Property tax records
· Birth Johannes, also Lindenmuth and Munch children
· Naturalization paper
· Addendum re: butchering
Chapter VI - Journey South, and Life in Rockingham County, VA
· The Forest area map
· Map showing Great Wagon Road from PA to VA, including key towns
· Klaus Wust Map
Chapter VII - Son, John in Rockingham County, VA
· Record of Little Dunmore’s War
· Record of Revolutionary War service
· John Sr’s Will
· List of John Sr’s estate
· Carrier vs Bowman court records
· Picture of tombstones in Rader Cemetery
Chapter VIII - Son, Elias in Berkeley County, and Washington County, TN
· Evidence of purchase of two tracts of land in Berkeley County
· Map/location of land purchased
· Lutheran Church records
· Washington County taxables
· Washington County deeds
· Greene County taxables
· Greene County deeds
· Estate information
Chapter IX - Son, George II and his Grandsons
· Church records supporting text
Chapter X - The Other Children - daughter, Maria Anna and son, Andrew
Afterward
DNA in Genealogical Research by Mel Bowman
Questions/Issues for Other Genealogists or Historians
Resources Consulted in the Writing of this Book
Index
Introduction
This is my story of serendipitous discovery. It will become your story if you are a descendent of immigrants George and Barbara Bowman. But the story of finding one’s ancestors is every person’s journey. Even if you do not claim George and Barbara as your ancestors, I believe you will find a story that enhances your own journey. We are, after all, more alike than different, and we often find ourselves in each others lives and experiences.
A Voice Said “Go Home”
Along with many other descendents of John Bowman, the son of immigrants George and Barbara, I was startled to discover in 2002 that the old Bowman House built by George and Barbara Bowman around 1773 was making news. It was about to be dismantled and rebuilt as part of the permanent display at the Frontier Culture Museum of Virginia at Staunton, Virginia. The house stood on what had been immigrant George Bowman’s farmstead located off present day Cold Spring Road, just north of the town of Timberville and Rader Lutheran Church in Rockingham County, Virginia. George purchased this property in 1772 when he relocated from Berks County, Pennsylvania.
Upon immigrant George’s death, the property transitioned to his son, John, in 1786. It remained in the Bowman family for more than two centuries, until 1998 when it was sold to Frazier Quarries, a limestone mining company. The Fraziers donated the house to the Frontier Culture Museum of Virginia, and that is where my story begins.
As my father aged, he developed a keen interest in genealogy. When I was a young adult, my family visits back home to Rockingham County, Virginia were filled with genealogy talk, much to my dismay. I found the stories tedious and repetitive, and of little interest to my life. But the fact that I wasn’t listening did not stop my father from telling them.
Things began to change for me in the late winter of 2002. I could no longer ignore the voice within telling me to go home. Finally I resolved to go, without knowing why, and where specifically, or for what reason. I had grown up in Rockingham County, Virginia. As an adult, I lived in Washington, DC, then in eastern Iowa for 22 years, finally moving to East Tennessee in 1998. Where was the home I was being called to, I wondered. Both of my parents were deceased. Our home place, where I grew up, had been sold long ago. Still, going home seemed to mean the place of my birth -- Rockingham County, Virginia.
I knew it was a six-hour trip one-way back to Rockingham County, Virginia from Maryville, Tennessee. At the time, I had not the slightest idea that some of my Bowman relatives had actually made the same trek the other way, from Virginia to Tennessee, 200 years earlier. In fact, I often had driven close by where several Bowman relatives had lived and were buried in Tennessee.
As I contemplated making the excursion home, I remembered a Sunday afternoon drive when I was in eighth grade. Dad had insisted I accompany the family on a visit to the old Bowman House, located past the town of Singer’s Glen, almost to the Shenandoah County line. I could no longer bring to mind an image of the house, but I did remember the fence out front and the large pond next door. Dad told us this was the house that our ancestor George Bowman built when he came to Virginia from Pennsylvania many years ago.
I called my older brother, Eldon, who lives in Broadway, Virginia, told him I was coming to see the old Bowman House and asked if he remembered how to get there. He did, but said the last Bowman inhabitant had died and the property recently sold. He agreed to check with the new owners to see if we could visit. Eldon called back to tell me the new owners had donated the old house to the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton, Virginia, about 40 miles south as the crow flies from its original location. Furthermore, demolition was to begin the following week. A fence had already been erected, and guards were posted to ensure no one removed any of the house before it could be moved and rebuilt on the Museum grounds.
My brother and I decided the odds of a guard being on duty at sun-up on the following Sunday morning were slim. I drove part way Saturday evening, then finished the drive north the next morning getting up in time to pick Eldon up and still be at the Bowman House by 6 a.m.. We arrived at the fence and after quickly surveying the landscape, scaled the fence carefully and slowly as guys in their mid-to-late 50s would do - and spent the next hour touring the house and taking dozens of pictures. Of course we had to cross that fence again on the way out -- once again carefully and slowly -- but what we left with was well worth the effort. We laughed at ourselves, two upstanding men of a certain age breaking and entering in the cause of genealogical research. What would our offspring think if they knew?
I returned home the same day to Maryville, Tennessee, with a feeling of satisfaction and the awareness we had gotten there just in time. Another few days and it would have been impossible to see my ancestral home in its original setting and document it with photographs. I knew it would be a couple years before the house would be open for tours at the Frontier Culture Museum, but now I had a stash of pictures, good memories and the feeling that I had answered the call to go home. Little did I know I had just begun a journey that would result in this book, a journey that would provide strong connections to history and place, and a journey that would result in a host of newly discovered relatives.
The Search is Renewed
In August 2005, my wife and I moved into a newly-constructed house. During the associated packing and unpacking, I found and read the George Bowman genealogy book first published in 1970 by Anna Harman Bowman. It was a gift from my father and had been carted across country several times with our moves but always remained in a box, never on the shelf. As I read, I was reminded that immigrant George had settled in Berks County, Pennsylvania and then relocated to Rockingham County, Virginia in about 1770. The assumption presented in the book was that son John had come to America with his parents as their only child. No one knew immigrant George’s wife’s name or their town of origin in Germany. From property tax records and a naturalization record, folks knew that George had owned property in Greenwich Township, Berks County, Pennsylvania from about 1754 until 1769.
Reading the Bowman book, along with the interest generated by the illicit tour of the Bowman House a few years earlier, combined to pique my curiosity. I decided to Google George Bowman and see what popped up. The most interesting find was a genealogy forum posting in which someone said they had found a record of the birth of immigrant George’s son John in church records in Pennsylvania. When I contacted the writer, to my surprise, she declined to share any information. But the simple awareness that a birth record existed was a sufficient spark to ignite my own search and it proved successful. I found the birth record myself. That experience of being denied information from a fellow researcher led me to be open with any and all information I’ve found.
Later in my search, I found my way around genealogy libraries and archives, but initially I worked entirely by browsing the Internet. One Berks County Web site offered volunteer assistants, one of whom provided me with copies of early church records. These provided not only John’s correct birth date, but also his mother’s name Maria Barbara. From this, I was certain that George and Maria Barbara had come to America earlier than the dates presented in the 1970 George Bowman book, but I still did not know the precise date or the name of their ship. Eventually, I was able to determine that several who associated with the Bowmans in Berks County had arrived on the ship, Patience, in 1749. Sure enough, that ship’s roster included a George Bowman. An early clue as to Bowman’s hometown area in Germany came when I found a record noting Asbach as the hometown of one of the other members of the group traveling with Bowmans.
After realizing Berks County did not exist until 1752, I found the record of immigrant George’s land purchase in Philadelphia County records, the county out of which Berks was formed. By that time, I also was becoming more familiar with German names and all the variations thereof. Immigrant George’s last name was spelled Bauman in these records, and I realized the odds were good he had a first name that had not been picked up in records in America. Through records of the Latter Day Saints church, I found several references to Johann Georg Baumann and Maria Barbara Keller couples living in Germany, Alsace and Switzerland just before 1750. After pursuing several dead ends, I decided the record of one of the couples who married in Bodigheim, Baden, Germany, merited additional on-site research. Bodigheim and Asbach, the home town of one of Bowman’s fellow travelers, are neighboring towns.
I did a quick search on the Internet and found contact information and customer feedback on several professional genealogists in Germany before hiring researcher Friedrich R. Wollmershauser. The results were astounding. We found Johann Georg and Maria Barbara’s marriage record, their parents’ names, and even George’s grandparents’ names! And most surprising, I discovered that George and Barbara had five children born in Germany, four still living when they boarded the ship to America. Later, we discovered records of immigrant George’s property sale and his manumission tax payment prior to departure. A manumission tax payment (explained in more detail in Chapter I) of 10 percent of one’s assets was required to legally emigrate from Germany at the time. Furthermore, names of others on the passenger list -- friends or relatives of George and Barbara in Bodigheim prior to everyone’s departure for America -- were later documented as neighbors and friends in Berks County, Pennsylvania.
The evidence that immigrants George and Barbara had other children in addition to my ancestor son John initiated an entirely new search. For this, I utilized DNA testing in addition to the usual and customary genealogical research methods. The story of the DNA results confirming Elias Bowman as a German-born son of immigrants George and Barbara and brother to my ancestor, John, is told in Chapter VIII. The story of finding Elias and John’s brother, George Bowman II, through DNA testing of descendents of his two sons, grandsons of immigrants George and Barbara, is laid out in Chapter XI.
Explanatory Notes
1. Reprints of the original George Bowman genealogy book:
Mary Ruth Parsons, a descendent of George’s and Barbara’s son John, published an updated edition of the 1970s George Bowman genealogy book which traces the lineage of son John, but not the other children. It is available for purchase by writing her at: Mary Ruth Parsons, 18788 Favre Ridge Road, Los Gatos, CA 95033. At the time of the 2007 printing, no one knew of the German-born children.
2. Spelling of Names:
Anyone working with genealogical records discovers that most names had various spellings. Often the spelling of names changed when written by clerks or ministers, or in translation. Other times individuals, especially Germans, changed to a more-English sounding spelling. Immigrant George Bowman was born as Johann Georg Baumann, and Barbara was born as Maria Barbara Keller. It appears that immigrant George primarily used George Bauman while residing in Pennsylvania, with the Bowman spelling appearing most common after the move to Virginia. In this book, when referring to specific records, the spelling from a specific record will be used. However, in general, the Bowman spelling will be used. It also is important to note and remember that for many of German origin, first names often were not the name by which people were commonly known. Some attribute this to the coming of Christianity to Europe and the desire to have Christian names. That desire could be satisfied by adding a Christian name first. Others suggest the first name was simply a family name. Whatever the origin, for Johann Georg Baumann, our immigrant ancestor, he was known as Georg or George not Johann or John. Johann Andreas Keller, Barbara’s father, was known as Andreas or Andrew, not Johann or John. Maria Barbara was almost certainly known as Barbara, not Maria. The name John was spelled Johann, Johan, Johannes, Hans, Hanns just to mention some variations.
3. Scholarship:
Documentation for all the genealogical facts noted in this book is provided at the end of each chapter. While all facts are accurate to the extent possible at this time, further study and new researchers will find facts that add to or perhaps even counter what is presented here. Such is the nature of genealogical study. More and better information is always welcome. My research unearthed many answers, but it also prompted additional questions. No doubt others will succeed in answering those questions, some of which are listed at the end of the book. A List of Sources Consulted in the Writing of this Book is included at the end of this book. But it is important to note this book is not a history or scholarly work in the traditional sense of that word. It is a family’s story told through my experience. Therefore no attempt has been made to footnote or reference each and every source used in this book.
Dedication
Appreciation
Preface
The Names
Introduction
· Aerial map of original location of Bowman House and farmstead
Chapter I - The Bowmans in Bodigheim
· Records obtained by Friedrich Wollmershauser from church archives
Chapter II - Friends and Relatives in Bodigheim
· Records obtained by Friedrich Wollmershauser from Karlsruhe archives
Chapter III - Bodigheim, The Town
· Map of location of Bodigheim relative to Heidelberg, Karlsruhe and Frankfurt
Chapter IV - The Passage and Arrival in Philadelphia
· Picture of similar ship
· 1750 map of Philadelphia showing key streets
· Records showing passenger list on ship Patience with George’s signature
Chapter V - Life in Berks County, Pennsylvania
· Map showing distance and likely path from Philadelphia to farm location in Berks County
· Greenwich Township map showing farm location
· Aerial map of farm site
· Land purchase records
· Property tax records
· Birth Johannes, also Lindenmuth and Munch children
· Naturalization paper
· Addendum re: butchering
Chapter VI - Journey South, and Life in Rockingham County, VA
· The Forest area map
· Map showing Great Wagon Road from PA to VA, including key towns
· Klaus Wust Map
Chapter VII - Son, John in Rockingham County, VA
· Record of Little Dunmore’s War
· Record of Revolutionary War service
· John Sr’s Will
· List of John Sr’s estate
· Carrier vs Bowman court records
· Picture of tombstones in Rader Cemetery
Chapter VIII - Son, Elias in Berkeley County, and Washington County, TN
· Evidence of purchase of two tracts of land in Berkeley County
· Map/location of land purchased
· Lutheran Church records
· Washington County taxables
· Washington County deeds
· Greene County taxables
· Greene County deeds
· Estate information
Chapter IX - Son, George II and his Grandsons
· Church records supporting text
Chapter X - The Other Children - daughter, Maria Anna and son, Andrew
Afterward
DNA in Genealogical Research by Mel Bowman
Questions/Issues for Other Genealogists or Historians
Resources Consulted in the Writing of this Book
Index
Introduction
This is my story of serendipitous discovery. It will become your story if you are a descendent of immigrants George and Barbara Bowman. But the story of finding one’s ancestors is every person’s journey. Even if you do not claim George and Barbara as your ancestors, I believe you will find a story that enhances your own journey. We are, after all, more alike than different, and we often find ourselves in each others lives and experiences.
A Voice Said “Go Home”
Along with many other descendents of John Bowman, the son of immigrants George and Barbara, I was startled to discover in 2002 that the old Bowman House built by George and Barbara Bowman around 1773 was making news. It was about to be dismantled and rebuilt as part of the permanent display at the Frontier Culture Museum of Virginia at Staunton, Virginia. The house stood on what had been immigrant George Bowman’s farmstead located off present day Cold Spring Road, just north of the town of Timberville and Rader Lutheran Church in Rockingham County, Virginia. George purchased this property in 1772 when he relocated from Berks County, Pennsylvania.
Upon immigrant George’s death, the property transitioned to his son, John, in 1786. It remained in the Bowman family for more than two centuries, until 1998 when it was sold to Frazier Quarries, a limestone mining company. The Fraziers donated the house to the Frontier Culture Museum of Virginia, and that is where my story begins.
As my father aged, he developed a keen interest in genealogy. When I was a young adult, my family visits back home to Rockingham County, Virginia were filled with genealogy talk, much to my dismay. I found the stories tedious and repetitive, and of little interest to my life. But the fact that I wasn’t listening did not stop my father from telling them.
Things began to change for me in the late winter of 2002. I could no longer ignore the voice within telling me to go home. Finally I resolved to go, without knowing why, and where specifically, or for what reason. I had grown up in Rockingham County, Virginia. As an adult, I lived in Washington, DC, then in eastern Iowa for 22 years, finally moving to East Tennessee in 1998. Where was the home I was being called to, I wondered. Both of my parents were deceased. Our home place, where I grew up, had been sold long ago. Still, going home seemed to mean the place of my birth -- Rockingham County, Virginia.
I knew it was a six-hour trip one-way back to Rockingham County, Virginia from Maryville, Tennessee. At the time, I had not the slightest idea that some of my Bowman relatives had actually made the same trek the other way, from Virginia to Tennessee, 200 years earlier. In fact, I often had driven close by where several Bowman relatives had lived and were buried in Tennessee.
As I contemplated making the excursion home, I remembered a Sunday afternoon drive when I was in eighth grade. Dad had insisted I accompany the family on a visit to the old Bowman House, located past the town of Singer’s Glen, almost to the Shenandoah County line. I could no longer bring to mind an image of the house, but I did remember the fence out front and the large pond next door. Dad told us this was the house that our ancestor George Bowman built when he came to Virginia from Pennsylvania many years ago.
I called my older brother, Eldon, who lives in Broadway, Virginia, told him I was coming to see the old Bowman House and asked if he remembered how to get there. He did, but said the last Bowman inhabitant had died and the property recently sold. He agreed to check with the new owners to see if we could visit. Eldon called back to tell me the new owners had donated the old house to the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton, Virginia, about 40 miles south as the crow flies from its original location. Furthermore, demolition was to begin the following week. A fence had already been erected, and guards were posted to ensure no one removed any of the house before it could be moved and rebuilt on the Museum grounds.
My brother and I decided the odds of a guard being on duty at sun-up on the following Sunday morning were slim. I drove part way Saturday evening, then finished the drive north the next morning getting up in time to pick Eldon up and still be at the Bowman House by 6 a.m.. We arrived at the fence and after quickly surveying the landscape, scaled the fence carefully and slowly as guys in their mid-to-late 50s would do - and spent the next hour touring the house and taking dozens of pictures. Of course we had to cross that fence again on the way out -- once again carefully and slowly -- but what we left with was well worth the effort. We laughed at ourselves, two upstanding men of a certain age breaking and entering in the cause of genealogical research. What would our offspring think if they knew?
I returned home the same day to Maryville, Tennessee, with a feeling of satisfaction and the awareness we had gotten there just in time. Another few days and it would have been impossible to see my ancestral home in its original setting and document it with photographs. I knew it would be a couple years before the house would be open for tours at the Frontier Culture Museum, but now I had a stash of pictures, good memories and the feeling that I had answered the call to go home. Little did I know I had just begun a journey that would result in this book, a journey that would provide strong connections to history and place, and a journey that would result in a host of newly discovered relatives.
The Search is Renewed
In August 2005, my wife and I moved into a newly-constructed house. During the associated packing and unpacking, I found and read the George Bowman genealogy book first published in 1970 by Anna Harman Bowman. It was a gift from my father and had been carted across country several times with our moves but always remained in a box, never on the shelf. As I read, I was reminded that immigrant George had settled in Berks County, Pennsylvania and then relocated to Rockingham County, Virginia in about 1770. The assumption presented in the book was that son John had come to America with his parents as their only child. No one knew immigrant George’s wife’s name or their town of origin in Germany. From property tax records and a naturalization record, folks knew that George had owned property in Greenwich Township, Berks County, Pennsylvania from about 1754 until 1769.
Reading the Bowman book, along with the interest generated by the illicit tour of the Bowman House a few years earlier, combined to pique my curiosity. I decided to Google George Bowman and see what popped up. The most interesting find was a genealogy forum posting in which someone said they had found a record of the birth of immigrant George’s son John in church records in Pennsylvania. When I contacted the writer, to my surprise, she declined to share any information. But the simple awareness that a birth record existed was a sufficient spark to ignite my own search and it proved successful. I found the birth record myself. That experience of being denied information from a fellow researcher led me to be open with any and all information I’ve found.
Later in my search, I found my way around genealogy libraries and archives, but initially I worked entirely by browsing the Internet. One Berks County Web site offered volunteer assistants, one of whom provided me with copies of early church records. These provided not only John’s correct birth date, but also his mother’s name Maria Barbara. From this, I was certain that George and Maria Barbara had come to America earlier than the dates presented in the 1970 George Bowman book, but I still did not know the precise date or the name of their ship. Eventually, I was able to determine that several who associated with the Bowmans in Berks County had arrived on the ship, Patience, in 1749. Sure enough, that ship’s roster included a George Bowman. An early clue as to Bowman’s hometown area in Germany came when I found a record noting Asbach as the hometown of one of the other members of the group traveling with Bowmans.
After realizing Berks County did not exist until 1752, I found the record of immigrant George’s land purchase in Philadelphia County records, the county out of which Berks was formed. By that time, I also was becoming more familiar with German names and all the variations thereof. Immigrant George’s last name was spelled Bauman in these records, and I realized the odds were good he had a first name that had not been picked up in records in America. Through records of the Latter Day Saints church, I found several references to Johann Georg Baumann and Maria Barbara Keller couples living in Germany, Alsace and Switzerland just before 1750. After pursuing several dead ends, I decided the record of one of the couples who married in Bodigheim, Baden, Germany, merited additional on-site research. Bodigheim and Asbach, the home town of one of Bowman’s fellow travelers, are neighboring towns.
I did a quick search on the Internet and found contact information and customer feedback on several professional genealogists in Germany before hiring researcher Friedrich R. Wollmershauser. The results were astounding. We found Johann Georg and Maria Barbara’s marriage record, their parents’ names, and even George’s grandparents’ names! And most surprising, I discovered that George and Barbara had five children born in Germany, four still living when they boarded the ship to America. Later, we discovered records of immigrant George’s property sale and his manumission tax payment prior to departure. A manumission tax payment (explained in more detail in Chapter I) of 10 percent of one’s assets was required to legally emigrate from Germany at the time. Furthermore, names of others on the passenger list -- friends or relatives of George and Barbara in Bodigheim prior to everyone’s departure for America -- were later documented as neighbors and friends in Berks County, Pennsylvania.
The evidence that immigrants George and Barbara had other children in addition to my ancestor son John initiated an entirely new search. For this, I utilized DNA testing in addition to the usual and customary genealogical research methods. The story of the DNA results confirming Elias Bowman as a German-born son of immigrants George and Barbara and brother to my ancestor, John, is told in Chapter VIII. The story of finding Elias and John’s brother, George Bowman II, through DNA testing of descendents of his two sons, grandsons of immigrants George and Barbara, is laid out in Chapter XI.
Explanatory Notes
1. Reprints of the original George Bowman genealogy book:
Mary Ruth Parsons, a descendent of George’s and Barbara’s son John, published an updated edition of the 1970s George Bowman genealogy book which traces the lineage of son John, but not the other children. It is available for purchase by writing her at: Mary Ruth Parsons, 18788 Favre Ridge Road, Los Gatos, CA 95033. At the time of the 2007 printing, no one knew of the German-born children.
2. Spelling of Names:
Anyone working with genealogical records discovers that most names had various spellings. Often the spelling of names changed when written by clerks or ministers, or in translation. Other times individuals, especially Germans, changed to a more-English sounding spelling. Immigrant George Bowman was born as Johann Georg Baumann, and Barbara was born as Maria Barbara Keller. It appears that immigrant George primarily used George Bauman while residing in Pennsylvania, with the Bowman spelling appearing most common after the move to Virginia. In this book, when referring to specific records, the spelling from a specific record will be used. However, in general, the Bowman spelling will be used. It also is important to note and remember that for many of German origin, first names often were not the name by which people were commonly known. Some attribute this to the coming of Christianity to Europe and the desire to have Christian names. That desire could be satisfied by adding a Christian name first. Others suggest the first name was simply a family name. Whatever the origin, for Johann Georg Baumann, our immigrant ancestor, he was known as Georg or George not Johann or John. Johann Andreas Keller, Barbara’s father, was known as Andreas or Andrew, not Johann or John. Maria Barbara was almost certainly known as Barbara, not Maria. The name John was spelled Johann, Johan, Johannes, Hans, Hanns just to mention some variations.
3. Scholarship:
Documentation for all the genealogical facts noted in this book is provided at the end of each chapter. While all facts are accurate to the extent possible at this time, further study and new researchers will find facts that add to or perhaps even counter what is presented here. Such is the nature of genealogical study. More and better information is always welcome. My research unearthed many answers, but it also prompted additional questions. No doubt others will succeed in answering those questions, some of which are listed at the end of the book. A List of Sources Consulted in the Writing of this Book is included at the end of this book. But it is important to note this book is not a history or scholarly work in the traditional sense of that word. It is a family’s story told through my experience. Therefore no attempt has been made to footnote or reference each and every source used in this book.