There was a story going around my family. Dad told me when I was young that when I heard about "Hessians" in the American Revolution, I should remember that one of our family had been forcibly conscripted from around Marburg, Germany and sent to the Colonies to fight with the British. He did not have much information beyond that, except the ancestor had defected and stayed to fight for the Continentals and had gotten land in the NW territory. There is a branch of the family living up by Toledo that I've never met, and he figured that was them. Our branch stayed home. I guess that makes my branch a bunch of Hessian draft dodgers, but what the hey!
Now you have to remember that from early on in the war, Ben Franklin was telling Congress to do everything they could to encourage Hessians to defect. There were about 200,000 of us in the Colonies at that time, and we were a prosperous bunch. Ben eventually drafted a handbill, translated into German that offered 50 acres, a cow, 2 pigs and farm implements to any Heinie that would come over the lines. A lot of them did. Of the 17,000 that went about a third took a powder.
All these years, I've been wondering what was up with that story. We're all big strapping German plow jockeys. We'd have made a good Grenadier or a Jager. There's even a story about one of us German mercs at Beemis Heights getting pissed off at our CO, a certain Lieutenant Colonel Heinrich Christoph Breymann. You may want to look him up. There are two Germans who turned the whole Second Battle of Saratoga. One is Breymann. He got a little panicky at the wrong time and decided to urge on his grenadiers by beating them with the flat of his saber about the head. The other is the nameless sargent who supposedly ran his bayonet through Breymann's chest and told his men, "Genug ist genug!" and walked off the field just as Benedict Arnold was charging their redoubt. The redoubt fell, the British right collapsed. Saratoga was lost, and about this time, the French decided this whole American Revolution thing might be worth putting some skin into the game. I've got a 25 year old son that makes me look tiny. He can't stand anyone touching his head. I think its genetic. Yes, you can thank a German for winning the American Revolution for you.
So here it is 2017. A long time has elapsed between 1777 and now. The trail is pretty cold and I figured the 8th Air Force had done its job of wiping out the archives of the Hessian regiments, along with most of my family's baptismal records for the past 500 years. However, I was wrong. Yes, the records exist.
http://freepages.military.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~amrevhessians/a/amhessians2.htm
It will take years of digging, but from that website I can deduce that we're in the book. Someone with my last name served in a Hessian Grenadier regiment and he stayed behind in America.
Bonus Fact: See Dad always used to mess with me the way his father had messed with him. No matter what subject came up in school Dad would say "A German invented that!" According to Dad, a German discovered America. Germans invented the light bulb, the airplane, and the automobile. He learned all this from his father who grew up in Germany. Come to find out, there are plausible arguments for all of them. I'm not saying I agree, but I've just given you a fact that a German or two turned the battle of Saratoga and in doing so swung things in favor of the Americans. If you're a German schoolkid in late 19th century Marburg, I'm you got your share of this stuff dished out with just enough fact in it.
So here's a fact bonus fact: The first man on the moon was a German. That's right. Neil Armstrong's mother was named Viola Louise Engel and she was from a German family from up around Wapokeneta, Ohio where the Continental Congress was handing out free land to the kraut defectors after the Revolution. I don't know if Neil's family defected like mine, but there you have it: A German was first to walk on the moon. I knew Neil Armstrong a little. We used to say hello each other at U.C. I never knew he was a krauthead. Dad would be proud.
