For the past few years, I’ve spent as much time as possible in York, PA.  I travel there to search for clues and records that tell me more about an ancestor, Johann Balthasar (Baldes, Baltzer, Balta) Knoertzer.*  On each trip I learn something new about Knoertzer, about myself, and about this particular region of Pennsylvania.

                                                I.  Journey from Treschklingen

He let loose on them his fierce anger, wrath, indignation, and distress, a company of destroying angels. (Psalms 78:49)

Balthasar Knoertzer, son of Killian, was nearly forty years old when he prepared his wife, Dorothea, along with his children to emigrate from Germany to America, a trip that was to take over six months to complete. Research indicates that at least one child (and probably three) was left behind with relatives.  The trip so grueling that only the stout were selected to embark and to survive.

Before leaving Germany, Balthasar sold off all of his family’s belongings.  Researcher Michael Sheppard notes:

            On 17 April 1738 an inventory of the property of Balthasar Knoertzer, including real estate, money, bedding, clothing, linens, tin articles, copper and bronze items, cabinets, barrels and kegs, farm equipment, wine, all kinds of kitchen equipment, cattle and other animals, and odds and ends, and debts, was made in Treschklingen in preparation for selling everything he could not take with him on his passage to America.

Most often, such a letting go of life’s possessions was a task to be completed in order to pay for the family’s passage aboard a ship where each person would be stacked like herrings in bedsteads scarcely two feet wide and six feet long.

            For the Knoertzers, the first leg of the trip to Holland was probably the most costly and was estimated to have taken as long as six weeks due to mandatory stops at thirty-six different custom houses along theRhine River. In Holland, the family was likely detained another five or six weeks while the custom house examined stock and completed cargo before being allowed to sail.  At Rotterdam, the Knoertzer family sailed to Cowes (on the Isle of Wight), which depending upon the wind was a trip that could take another three to four weeks, as well as deplete the remainder of a family’s funds.  The Knoertzers left Cowes aboard the Charming Nancy, a vessel manned by Captain Charles Steadman and crew, designed to carry up to six hundred passengers.  On the first day of the final embarking, the Knoertzers were most assuredly tired and financially spent.

            Gottlieb Mittelberger, in his 1750 narrative, describes such a voyage in this manner:

            During the voyage there is on board these ships terrible misery, stench, fumes, horror, vomiting, many kinds of sicknesses, fever, dysentery, headache, heat, constipation, boils, scurvy, cancer, mouth-rot and the like, all of which come from old and sharply salted food and meat, also from very bad and foul water so that many die miseraely (sic).  Add to this want of provisions, hunger, thirst, cold, heat, dampness, anxiety, want, affliction, and lamentations, together viith other troubles such as lice which abound so plentifully, especially on sick people, that they can be scraped off the body, the misery reaches the climax when a gale rages for two or three days and nights so that everyone believes that the ship will go to the bottom with all the human beings on board.

            Among the healthy, impatience sometimes grows so great and cruel that one curses the other or himself and the day of his birth and sometimes come near killing each other.  Misery and Malice join each other so that they cheat and rob one another.  One always reproaches the other for persuading him to undertake the journey.  Frequently children cry out against their parents, husbands againt their wives and wives against their husbands, brothers, and sisters, friends and accuaintances (sic) against each other, but mostly against the soul-traffickers (the Newlanders.)

            In 1738, the year that Balthasar led his family to the sea, more than 1800 passengers died while making the crossing aboard fourteen ships. The sailing conditions were so dire that the season became known as The Year of the Destroying Angels.  These angels claimed Dorothea, the Knoertzer wife and mother who'd left a babe and other children behind in conditions of starvation in Germany.  I've often imagined the crowded berths in darkness, the swelling sickness, the stillness of death, and Balthasar's knowledge that the wife beside him would now rest permanently  in the waters of the Atlantic.

 Part II: Arrival in York

Notes:

*Knoertzer, Knortzer, Knertzer, Knatzer, Connatser, Kanatzer, Conatser

(1)   Michael Sheppard/database:

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~shep/shep/I544.html

(2) Gottlieb Mittelberger's journey to Pennsylvania in the year 1750 and return to Germany in the year 1754: containing not only a description of the country according to its present condition, but also a detailed account ...

By Gottlieb Mittelberger, Carl Theodor Eben

Translated by Carl Theodor Eben

Published by Pri. print. for J. Y. Jeanes, 1898

Original from the University of Michigan

Digitized Jan 9, 2007

129 pages