♂Johann Schultheiss

Johann Schultheiss was a tailor from the village of Gaugrehweiler, near Kreuznach in Germany, who joined the great Palatine^W emigration of 1709, married a widow at West Camp on the Hudson in 1710, and later settled in the Mohawk Valley. Within a year of reaching New York, he served as a soldier in the expedition of 1711 against Canada^W. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through his probable son Johannes Schultz (died before October 1783).

Emigration and marriage

The Lutheran church book at West Camp calls him a “tailor of Gahgrabler near Creutzenech”, the village now written Gaugrehweiler. In 1709 he joined the thousands of Germans from the Rhine lands who traveled down the river to Holland and on to England. At Rotterdam he was listed on his own, beside several of the Wohlleben family, in the fifth party of emigrants.

In 1710 the British government shipped nearly 3,000 of the Palatines to New York, where Governor Robert Hunter^W settled them in camps along the Hudson to make tar and other naval stores for the Crown, and fed them in return. Johann first drew rations on Hunter’s subsistence lists on 4 July 1710, as a single person. On 12 September 1710, at West Camp, Johann Schultheiss married Anna Barbara, the widow of Johann Rautenbusch of Emmerich in the Pfaltz. The marriage was entered in the church book of the Lutheran pastor Joshua Kocherthal^W. By the end of the year Johann’s entry on the lists counted two people.

Soldier and settler

In 1711, while living at Hunterstown, one of the camp villages, Johann served as a soldier among the Palatine volunteers raised for the attack on Canada. The army turned back that autumn without fighting, after the British fleet bound for Quebec was wrecked in the St. Lawrence. He was naturalized at Albany on 31 January 1715/16. About 1716 or 1717 Ulrich Simmendinger’s register of the New York Palatines found Johann, his wife Anna Barbara and two children at the settlement it calls Neu-Heidelberg.

The family later moved west to the Mohawk Valley. In 1733 Johann and Peter Soots are said to have bought land in the Stone Arabia Patent from Christian Gerlach, and about 1744 Pastor Sommer of the Schoharie Lutheran church listed him, as Johannes Schultz, with his family among the households of the Mohawk Valley.

Later life

On 6 April 1759, “Johannis Schults, Widwr., of Stonerabe in the County of Albany” made his will. It was never recorded. The couple probably had five children: Johann Jacob, Christopher, Anna Maria and Johannes, all named in Johann’s will of 1759, and Maria Elisabetha Barbara, who appears with the family about 1744. The date of Johann’s death is not known.

Notes

How the family is known

The records of his life come from Henry Z. Jones’s The Palatine Families of New York 1710 (pp. 930–932, with the entry for Johann Rautenbusch’s widow on pp. 750–751), which abstracts the West Camp Lutheran church book, the Rotterdam lists of 1709, Governor Hunter’s subsistence lists, the 1711 roll of Palatine volunteers to Canada, the Albany naturalizations, Simmendinger’s register and Pastor Sommer’s family list. The 1733 land purchase and the 1759 will, which Jones calls “unrecorded”, come to Jones from Sue McCartney Van Wie’s The Shults Family in America. Jones gives the five children from that will and from Sommer’s list, and the link to Johannes Schultz rests on the will alone; Jones does not print its text.

Before the emigration

Jones suggests that a Johann Schulteiss “from Kernweiler”, who stood as a baptismal sponsor in the family of the emigrant Valentin Wohlleben at Trippstadt in 1708, was probably this man, because Johann was listed next to Hans Velten Wohlleben at Rotterdam and near him again on Hunter’s lists.

The name

The records write him Schultheiss, Schultheisch, Schulteis, Scholdies (at his naturalization), Schuldtes (in Simmendinger’s register), Scholteys, Schultz and Schults. His son’s family went by Schultz.

Other men of the name

Stone Arabia had several men called Johannes Schultz. A Johannes Shulties was a freeholder there in 1763, but Jones notes that he was one of three of that name, and Jacob, Stoffel and Johannes Schultheis served together in a militia company in 1757; either entry may belong to a son or grandson rather than to Johann, so neither is counted in his life above. The “Hanes Schulz and wife Magdalena” who were godparents at Stone Arabia in 1754 may have been his son Johannes and Maria Magdalena.