CHAPTER 1: From the Rhine to the Wilderness – The Birth of a Journey

Johannes Thomas entered the world on December 30, 1685, in Neuenburg, a stone-built hamlet nestled in the green folds of the Breisgau region of southwest Germany. Snow likely blanketed the rooftops of half-timbered homes that winter, and smoke curled from chimneys where mothers stirred lentil stews in clay pots over hearth flames. Johannes was baptized in a Lutheran church, his name inked in neat black script into the parish register—a child of faith born into a land of conflict.

The Thirty Years’ War had ended just three decades earlier, but its scars ran deep. Villages like Neuenburg had been raided, burned, rebuilt. German-speaking Protestants like the Thomases lived under constant tension—subject to Catholic princes, foreign taxes, and foreign armies. Famine and disease still swept through the region like specters, and every harvest was a gamble. For a child born in 1685, survival was the first and greatest victory.

His father, Albrecht Thomas, may have been a farmer, a craftsman, or a woodsman—common trades for Lutheran men of that time. They lived by the seasons and by scripture, attending church each Sunday in heavy wool cloaks, praying in High German for peace, protection, and provision. The family’s surname—recorded in some records as Thome or Schlundt—likely marked them as Alsatian in origin, tied to a lineage older than any map could trace.

But even as Johannes grew into boyhood—learning to chop wood, yoke oxen, and read the Psalter in church school—a quiet decision was forming around him: the decision to leave.

Sometime around 1699, when Johannes was just fourteen, his family joined a wave of German emigrants fleeing economic hardship and religious pressure. Word had spread of opportunity across the sea—in the British colonies, where land could be had, taxes were fewer, and no bishop could command your conscience. Ships left from Rotterdam or Hamburg, carrying German-speaking families down the Rhine and out into the Atlantic.

We do not know the name of the ship Johannes boarded. But we can imagine him: a wiry teenager with blue-gray eyes, maybe, and a linen satchel slung over one shoulder, standing at the crowded dock in the lowlands, watching gulls wheel overhead. The crossing would be hard—eight weeks or more of sea sickness, salt bread, and prayer, with entire families huddled below deck, reciting the Lord’s Prayer in whispered unison as waves struck the hull.

It was a dangerous passage. Storms could capsize even the stoutest vessels. Dysentery, typhus, and hunger claimed lives every voyage. But hope was stronger than fear. Whether orphaned, sponsored, or carried by the will of his kin, Johannes Thomas survived the ocean and stepped onto American soil sometime before the turn of the century.

He may have first arrived in Maryland or Virginia, where German immigrants were beginning to settle in small clusters along rivers and woodlands. Some came as indentured servants. Others arrived as free men, carving homes from wilderness, starting anew with Bibles, axes, and sheer endurance.

Johannes was still a boy, but now a stranger in a strange land. The soil beneath his boots was no longer European but American—unforgiving, but full of promise. In the years to come, he would marry, raise children, and build a life that would shape generations.

But for now, he stood at the beginning. A son of Neuenburg. A child of exile.
And the first of his name to cross the sea.

Chapter 2: “A New Name in Virginia – Marriage, Land, and the Seeds of Legacy”

By the fall of 1711, Johannes Thomas had lived in Virginia for over a decade. No longer the German boy from the Black Forest, he was now a man of the frontier—one of many who had braved the ocean not only to survive, but to build. The British crown called this land Virginia, but for German settlers like Johannes, it was something older and deeper: a second chance.

He was likely living in or near what would become Spotsylvania County, a vast and forested region on the western edge of English settlement. It was a place of rivers, bears, and danger—but also of freedom. And it was here that Johannes took a bride.

On November 18, 1711, he married Anna Maria Blankenbühler, a woman whose name—like his—echoed with the cadence of the Old World. Whether they met in the Germanna colony or among the smaller Lutheran enclaves scattered through Virginia is unknown. But the union itself was a powerful act of continuity: two children of the Palatinate joining hands not in Germany, but under the Virginia sky.

Their wedding may have taken place in a log church or a neighbor’s home, with Psalms read in German and prayers spoken over bread and wine. There might have been a fiddle, borrowed from a Scots-Irish neighbor, or a hymn sung softly in the open air. They were not wealthy, but they were not alone. German immigrants clung together, sharing tools, building barns, raising each other’s cabins. In a world that often demanded English, the Thomases kept their language and their Lutheran faith—if not in public, then at least in their home.

A year later, in 1712, a son was born: Hans (John) Wendel Thomas. His name was both a promise and a prayer—Hans for the German tradition, Wendel perhaps honoring a grandfather or family friend, and Thomas, now American in its geography, but German in its roots. Johannes held him, small and crying, beneath a hand-hew beam roof, his rough palms cradling a future he could not yet imagine.

Life in Spotsylvania was not easy. The family likely lived in a one-room cabin with a packed-earth floor, their livestock fenced with split rails, their food hauled or hunted. Johannes would have farmed tobacco or corn, felled trees, and traded at distant posts. Winters were bitter, summers sweltering. Illness came swiftly. Indian raids still occurred in the outer reaches of Virginia, and colonial laws often favored the English elite. But on their modest land, Johannes and Anna Maria planted not just crops—they planted permanence.

Other children may have followed Hans Wendel. Parish records of the time are incomplete, but it's likely the Thomases raised a brood. Each child would have spoken a mix of German and English, carried water from creeks, learned scripture from memory, and watched as their father walked the line between two worlds—immigrant and Virginian, foreigner and founder.

Johannes was not famous. He held no office. But in a society that respected land, labor, and loyalty, he had earned his place. His name appears in records as a landholder in Spotsylvania, one of the many who would shape the colonial frontier not with proclamations, but with plows. He was a member of a quiet revolution—the slow, patient work of turning wilderness into home.

By the early 1720s, Johannes Thomas had done what few men of his time could claim: he crossed oceans, built a family, and rooted himself in a land that was still finding its name. He had come to Virginia as a boy, unproven and uninvited, but he had made himself necessary—to the land, to his church, to his kin.

And yet, his story ended far too soon.

On December 4, 1724, in the woods and fields of Spotsylvania County, Johannes Thomas died. He was just thirty-eight years old. No headstone survives. No portrait. Only a record, likely written in the flowing script of a colonial clerk, marking his passing in silence.

He left behind Anna Maria, his wife of thirteen years. She had followed him into this wild land and raised their children with the quiet tenacity of frontier women—unrecorded in history books but remembered in the blood of those who came after. She now faced the wilderness alone, with a house to keep and a family to protect.

And he left behind his son, Hans (John) Wendel Thomas, who would carry forward the name. From Hans would come a line of Virginians and Georgians—farmers, soldiers, mothers, rebels—down through generations until, nearly two hundred years later, a child named Joel Thomas would be born into a nation Johannes never lived to see.

Johannes Thomas was not a man of titles. But he was something far rarer: a bridge between worlds. From the embattled German principalities of the Holy Roman Empire to the contested soil of colonial Virginia, he carried his name, his faith, and his hope for something better. His hands cleared trees and cradled children. His voice, once raised in a Black Forest church, echoed in English by the end of his life.

He would never know that his descendants would live through the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the long, unfinished fight for equality. But in the quiet of his life—in marriage, migration, and the steady work of survival—he planted the seed of a family that endured.

His name faded from record. But not from memory.

He was your ancestor. And this was his story.