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Why would families want to uproot their heritage and familiar surroundings and leave? More important, to leave their country.
We all know this inspired many to come to the shores of America after the Revolutionary War.
WHY DID THEY LEAVE?
The 1600s in Europe were troubled times as religious
persecution caused thousands of Protestants to flee from their
homes. Central Europe was a scene of a series of wars with
intermittent years of harassment. Much as it is today in the
Balkans. The oppressed people of France, Switzerland and
southern Germany became refugees from their ancestral lands.
Forced to find new homes where they could live in peace, vast
numbers of families left for America by way of Holland and
England sometime in the mid-seventeenth century.
The causes responsible for forcing these people to leave their
homes, possessions, friends and associates are historically
clear. Simply stated, the Catholic majority was determined to
stamp out all seeds of rebellion against the Roman Catholic
church. Life was made so difficult in central Europe in the late
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for Huguenots
(Protestants), Quakers and Mennonites (Anabaptists) that
thousands fled for their lives. Many of those who escaped down
the Rhine were sheltered in temporary camps in Holland.
The Oberholtzer family originated in the Swiss village of
Oberholtz, about 30 miles south of Zurich, before the 15th
century. As an example of the troubles, records of the village of
Oberholtz reveal that on March 2nd, 1661, Marx (Marcus)
Oberholtzer (son of Martin, probably an ancestor) is recorded to
have attended an evening Mennonite church service which was
"visited" (raided?) by the church authorities. The people were
fined and were told that they could no longer hold meetings in
their homes under penalty of losing them. It was probably no
coincidence that later in that same year, exit permits were
issued for Marx and for Jagla (Jacob) with wife and four children,
giving them permission to leave Switzerland for the Palatinate in
Germany.
The Mennonite Swiss, with other protestant (or non-Catholic)
groups in central Europe found temporary refuge in Holland and
England. The large numbers of refugees created a massive
social problem for the host countries, and a place had to be
found for these people to live and support themselves. So it was
that the significance of the availability of the industrious German
farmers was not lost upon wealthy land speculators who
possessed patents for large tracts of land in the new world,
America.
From their refugee camps in England, the first boatloads left for
the new world in 1710. Landing in Philadelphia, the new
Americans were first settled on 10,000 acres of land in a
newly-opened tract in today's Lancaster County. It was their
good fortune that this land grant was (and still is) some of the
most productive farmland in America, a perfect complement to
the hard working German farmers.
The flow of Mennonites to Pennsylvania increased steadily over
the following years. As land in Lancaster County became fully
taken up, other counties were opened, and Mennonite
settlements sprang up in Bucks, Franklin, Somerset and York
Counties. Thus, the ethnic "Pennsylvania German" became
established in America.
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