open arms and civilized tribes

"Johannes Jacob Peter Batdorf was born ca. 1671 in Darmstadt, in the current state of Hessen, Germany, and died in London, England in 1709.

He married Anna Maria Catharina Anspach. After his death, she married Johannes Zellar in 1712 in New York. She died in 1747/8 at Millbach, Lebanon County, Pennsylvania. She was buried in the old Rieth's Church cemetery next to her second husband.

Johannes and Anna lived for several years in Palatine, Germany, where their five children were born.

In the summer of 1708, Johannes and family fled religious persecution and wars, and left their home in the small village of Badorf, near Stuttgart, in the current state of Baden-Wurttenberg, Germany.

They traveled by boat down the Rhine River to Rotterdam, Holland, then traveled by boat to England to await further transportation to America.

Like the Hans Adam Walborn family with whom they had become acquainted, and with whose children their children would marry, they joined thousands of others who took advantage of Queen Anne's offer of transportation to America, with the intention of establishing a colony in the present state of New York.

Johannes died in London before the journey to America by his family began, and three of the five children died enroute or shortly after arriving in New York on Jun 10, 1710.

When the boat landed, the passengers set up tents that they had brought with them from England, and lived in them. They remained until late autumn, when about fourteen hundred of them, including our Batdorf and Walborn families, were moved a hundred miles up the Hudson River to Livingston Manor. (Today, there is a town of Livingstonville in Schoharie County.)

The three surviving members of this family lived at Livingston Manor, New York for two years until Governor Hunter refused to pay the bill for their subsistence because the English Crown was slow in reimbursing him. Consequently,

 Anna and the two children joined a group of about 150 Germans, including the Walborns, and moved about 60 miles northwest to Schoharie Valley to New Annsburg (sometimes called Schmidsdorf), pulling their belongings on crude sleds through a forest and over three feet of snow without horses or roads. It took them three weeks to travel the 60 miles.

About this time (1712), Anna Maria Catharina married Johannes Georg Zellar. He was born in 1686 in France and died in 1737 about the age of 51. He was the younger son of Jacques de Sellaire and Clothelde de Valois.

After living in Schoharie about ten years, 33 families (150 people), including the Battdorfs and Walborns, had their land and improvements taken away from them because of some defect in their land titles. About this time, Governor Keith of Pennsylvania visited them and invited them to Pennsylvania.

In late winter, 1722, the group began the journey, travelling by a well-known and much used route down 300 miles of the Susquehanna River on crude flatboats and canoes. The cattle were driven along the riverbanks. They arrived at the mouth of the Swatara Creek, now Middletown, in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, about May 19, 1723.

 By Jun, 1723, they had traveled up the Swatara Creek and landed at their destination, about fifteen miles west of Reading to a point near Jonestown in the western part of what is now Lebanon county. From there they made their way on foot across the country to the Tulpehocken region, east of Stouchsburg.

At that time there were no roads in the area. Indians guided their entire journey and became their neighbors.

The tract of land settled by this group was about ten thousand acres in the Tulpehocken and Lebanon Valleys. Deeds were procured from the three Penns: John, Thomas, and Richard.

Anna Maria Catherina and Johannes Zellar squatted on land which is now called Millbach in Lebanon County.

The two children of Johannes Jacob Peter Batdorf and Anna Maria Catharina Anspach who survived the voyage to America were:"

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/33588394/johannes-jacob_peter-batdorf


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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Palatines

"A report in 1718 placed 224 families of 1,021 persons along the Hudson River while 170 families of 580 persons were in Schoharie.[29] In 1723, under Governor Burnet, 100 heads of families from the work camps were settled on 100 acres (0.40 km2) each in the Burnetsfield Patent midway in the Mohawk River Valley, just west of Little Falls.

 They were the first Europeans to be allowed to buy land that far west in the valley. In the winter of 1712-13, six Palatine leaders met a council of the clan mothers of the Haudenosaunee League (known as the Iroquois to the Europeans) and asked for permission to settle on their land.[27]

 The Palatines did not understand that the Haudenosaunee were a matriarchal society ruled over by the clan mothers who headed the 9 clans that made up the Five Nations, and were surprised to be meeting a council of clan mothers instead of the male sachems they had expected.

After hearing Palatine stories of poverty and suffering, the clan mothers granted permission for the Palatines to come.[27] The clan mothers also had ulterior motives.

 The 17th century had seen the Haudenosaunee take massive population losses as European diseases to which they had no immunity had greatly reduced their numbers; the Haudenosaunee had spent much of the 17th century engaged in wars with the French and other Indigenous nations; and finally in the 1670s-80s French Jesuit missionaries had converted thousands to Catholicism and then persuaded the converts to settle outside of Montreal.[30]

 Historians call the Haudenosaunee who moved to New France the Canadian Iroquois, while those who remained behind are described as the League Iroquois. At the beginning of the 17th century, there were about 2,000 Haudenosaunee living in the Mohawk River Valley and by the beginning of the 18th century, the population was down to about 600 people, placing them in a weak position to resist land grabs by British settlers.[30]

 The governors of New York had showed a tendency to grant Haudenosaunee land to British settlers without permission, and from the viewpoint of the clan mothers, having the poor Palatines lease their land was a preemptive way of blocking the governors from granting their land to land-hungry immigrants from the British isles.[30]

 In their turn, the British authorities believed that the Palatines would serve as a protective barrier, providing a reliable militia who would stop French and Indigenous raiders coming down from New France (modern Canada).[31]

The Palatine communities gradually extended along both sides of the Mohawk River to Canojoharie. Their legacy was reflected in place names, such as German Flatts and Palatine Bridge, and the few colonial-era churches and other buildings that survived the Revolution. They taught their children German and used the language in churches for nearly 100 years. Many Palatines married only within the German community until the 19th century.

The Palatines settled on the frontiers of New York province in Kanienkeh ("the land of the flint"), the homeland of the Five Nations of the Iroquois League (becoming the Six Nations when the Tuscarora joined the League in 1722) in what is now upstate New York, and formed a very close relationship with the Iroquois. The American historian David L. Preston described the lives of the Palatine community as being "interwoven" with the Iroquois community.[32] One Palatine leader declared about the relationship of his community with the Haudenosauee that: "We intend to live our lifetime together as brothers".[32]

 The Haudenosauee taught the Palatines about the best places to gather wild edible nuts together with roots and berries, and how to grow the "Three Sisters", as the Iroquois called their staple foods of beans, squash and corn.[30] One Palatine leader, Johann Conrad Weiser, had his son raised by a Mohawk family to order to provide the Palatines with both an interpreter and a friend who might bridge the gap between the two communities, which were so different.[30]

The Palatines came from the patriarchal society of Europe whereas the Haudenosaunee had a matriarchal society, where the clan mothers were the leaders who selected the sachems and the chiefs. The Haudenosaunee means "the People of the Longhouse" while Iroquois is a derogatory Basque-Algonquin word for them meaning the "killer people" that is considered offensive by the Haudenosaunee.

The Haudenosaunee admired the work ethic of the Palatines, and often rented their land to the hard-working immigrants.[30] In their turn, the Palatines taught Haudenosaunee women how to use iron plows and hoes to farm the land together with how to grow oats and wheat.[30] For the Haudenosaunee, farming was woman's work as it was sole responsibility of Haudenosaunee women to plant, grow and harvest the crops, and they considered the Palatine men to be unmanly because they worked the fields[citation needed]. Additionally, the Palatines brought sheep, cows, and pigs to Kanienkeh.[30]

 With increased agricultural production and money coming in as rent, the Haudenosaunee began to sell the surplus food to merchants in Albany.[30] Many clan mothers and chiefs, who had grown wealthy enough to live at about the same standard of living as a middle-class family in Europe, abandoned their traditional log houses for European style houses.[30]

In 1756, one Palatine farmer brought 38,000 beads of black wampum during a trip to Schenectady, which was enough to make dozens upon dozens of wampum belts, which were commonly presented to Indigenous leaders as gifts when being introduced.[32] Preston noted that the purchasing of so much wampum reflected the very close relations the Palatines had with the Iroquois.[32]

 The Palatines used their metal-working skills to repair weapons that belonged to the Iroquois, built mills that ground corn for the Iroquois to sell to merchants in New York and New France, and their churches were used for Christian Iroquois weddings and baptisms.[33] There were also a number of intermarriages between the two communities.[33] Doxstader, a surname common in some of the rural areas of south-western Germany is also a common Iroquois surname."