Hans Velten “Felty” Petermann
& Anna Elisabetha

At the Center of the Migration

Hans Velten Petermann and Anna Elisabetha stand at the hinge of the Peterman story. Behind them lay generations rooted in the neighboring Palatine villages of Wollmesheim and Mörzheim. Ahead of them lay an American family that would move from Pennsylvania to Ohio, from Ohio to Iowa, and eventually across the nation.

Their importance is easy to obscure because the surviving records speak more loudly for their sons. Hans Peter appears on the Patience passenger material in 1748. Michael appears beside “Welten Peterman” on the Osgood list in 1750. In Pennsylvania, Peter and Michael acquired land and left estate files. Their younger brother Daniel married at York in 1761. The parents themselves left a thinner documentary trail.

Yet the pattern created by those records is unmistakable. This was not the story of a solitary young man who abandoned one world and improvised another. It was a family migration carried out in stages. One adult son crossed first. Two years later the father and another adult son followed. Younger children later appear in York County church records, while older children remained in Germany. The household divided risk across an ocean and then built new family connections on both sides of it.

Rooted in Mörzheim

Hans Velten was born at Mörzheim on 4 June 1692, during the long aftermath of war and destruction in the Palatinate. The family did not begin as landless strangers. A Palatine census abstract quoted in the family sheet describes a tenant living on “Velten Petermann’s orphan’s estate” and expecting to leave because “the Petermann children wish to farm.” The wording is brief, but it places inheritance, land and agricultural intention near the center of the early family story.

Hans Velten and Anna Elisabetha had formed their household by the birth of their first recorded child in 1719. Their children arrived across more than two decades, from Anna Margaretha in 1719 to Anna Maria Margareth in 1742. The home therefore contained adults, adolescents and young children at the same time. When migration began, the oldest children were capable of making separate choices, while the youngest still depended on their parents.

Chapter 1 describes the villages, Reformed faith, vineyards, fields and repeated wars that formed this family. Here the emphasis is narrower: Hans Velten and Anna Elisabetha had spent roughly thirty years building a household in Mörzheim before any member of it sailed for Pennsylvania. Leaving was not the act of rootless people. It was the calculated breaking and replanting of deep roots.

Ten Children, a Divided Future

The family sheet records ten children. Their lives show that “the family emigrated” is too simple a phrase. Some crossed the Atlantic, some remained in Germany, one died in childhood, and the later lives of others are still indistinct.

The youngest children’s marriages in York County matter. They show that the American migration was broader than the two adult male names preserved on the Osgood oath lists. The documents do not reveal exactly when or with whom every daughter and younger son traveled, but by 1760–1761 members born late in Hans Velten and Anna Elisabetha’s Mörzheim household were established in Pennsylvania.

Peter Goes First

Hans Peter Petermann crossed the Atlantic aboard the ship Patience in 1748. That correction matters: Peter did not arrive on the Osgood. His name belongs to an earlier voyage, two years before his father and brother Michael made their crossing.

An adult son going first made practical sense. Peter could learn the route from Philadelphia, find German-speaking communities west of the city, investigate land and work, and create a point of arrival for relatives who followed. No surviving letter proves that this was a formal family plan, so the chapter does not present the strategy as a recorded conversation. The timing nevertheless supports the interpretation that migration occurred in deliberate stages.

Father and Son on the Osgood

On 29 September 1750 the ship Osgood, William Wilkie master, arrived at Philadelphia after sailing from Rotterdam by way of Cowes. The adult male oath material includes “Welten Peterman” and “Michael Peterman.” The pairing supplies the chapter’s strongest direct transatlantic evidence: father and son were on the same vessel.

Hans Velten was fifty-eight years old. Michael was twenty-three. For the father, migration meant leaving the only region he had known after a lifetime of farming, births and burials. For the son, it meant entering adulthood in a new country. Their different ages made the same crossing two different acts of courage.

Fellow passenger Gottlieb Mittelberger later described the crowded berths, foul water, disease, storms and grief endured on an Atlantic passage in 1750. His account does not tell us what the Petermans personally experienced at every moment, but it gives rare eyewitness context for the ship on which they traveled.

Anna Elisabetha and the Missing Women

Anna Elisabetha’s absence from the passenger list must not be mistaken for proof that she remained in Germany or had died. Eighteenth-century arrival lists commonly recorded adult men who swore the required oaths; wives, daughters and younger children often went unnamed. The surviving Osgood material can therefore prove that Welten and Michael arrived, but it cannot provide a complete household roster.

The current family sheet gives no maiden name, parents, birth date or death date for Anna Elisabetha. Older drafts and online trees supply additional details, but those claims are not supported by the attached sheet and are not adopted here. Her name is therefore printed exactly as the evidence supports it: Anna Elisabetha, maiden name unknown.

The appearance of younger children in York County is compatible with a mother traveling with them, but it is not proof. Until a church, probate, land or burial record identifies her in Pennsylvania, the responsible conclusion is narrower: she was the mother of the documented Mörzheim household; whether she crossed the Atlantic remains an open question.

A Family Reassembled in York County

The Petermans joined a broad stream of German-speaking settlers moving west from Philadelphia into the interior. Peter became associated with a plantation important enough to help define the early boundary of Windsor Township. Michael acquired Lovely Springs and built the household followed in Chapter 4. Daniel and Anna Maria Margareth married in York. Baptismal sponsorships tied Petermans to neighboring German families and congregations.

The family sheet does not identify a separate Pennsylvania land patent or estate file for the elder Hans Velten. It is possible that he lived within the household of an adult child rather than establishing a tract in his own name. That arrangement would not have been unusual. An aging father could contribute knowledge, labor and family authority while sons held the documents that survive.

The image of a first cabin belongs to the family’s settlement world but not to a proven building contract for Hans Velten. Cabins, fields, fences and outbuildings were the physical work of settlement; assigning one particular structure to the older couple would go beyond the evidence.

The Revolutionary Generation

By the time the American Revolution began, Hans Velten was in his eighties. No verified record in the current sheet establishes that he served in a military unit, and this chapter makes no such claim. The war nevertheless surrounded the family he and Anna Elisabetha had created.

Michael appears in Captain Jacob Beaver’s company of the York Associates, and Pennsylvania later acknowledged money owed for a gun taken from him for public service. Peter served Windsor Township as an overseer of the poor in 1776 and again in 1778, which the family sheet interprets as recognition by his peers during the Revolutionary period. Daniel later helped hold church property in trust for Lutheran and Reformed congregations.

The transformation occurred within a single parental lifetime. Children baptized under German spellings at Mörzheim became landholders, church sponsors, public officers, militia members, wives, widows and household heads in British—and then independent—Pennsylvania.

Last Traces and Unknown Graves

The family sheet reports that Hans Velten died after 26 September 1782, probably in York County. Because the underlying record that establishes that boundary is not reproduced in the sheet’s notes, this edition retains the wording as a reported research conclusion rather than converting it into an exact death date.

No verified will, estate inventory or marked grave has been identified for him. No secure Pennsylvania death or burial record has been found for Anna Elisabetha. Burial on or near land occupied by one of their sons is possible, but possibility is not documentation.

That silence is historically meaningful. Many eighteenth-century graves were marked with fieldstone, wood or nothing durable. Women’s identities were often compressed into a husband’s household. Elderly parents could vanish from taxable-property lists while remaining central to family life. The absence of a monument does not measure the size of their influence.

What They Set in Motion

Hans Velten and Anna Elisabetha raised the generation that carried the Petermann family across the Atlantic. Peter went first in 1748. Welten and Michael followed in 1750. Daniel and at least one younger sister later appear in York County. Other children maintained the German branch. The family did not simply move; it divided, adapted and continued in two countries.

Their direct American legacy is most visible through Michael. From Michael and Anna Maria came John Peterman; from John and Barbara Eckert came the Ohio generation; from Jacob and Mary Ann Cornman came the Iowa story. Every later move in this book rests on the first family decisions made while Hans Velten and Anna Elisabetha’s children were still part of one Mörzheim household.

Chapter 1 gave them a place—the villages that shaped them. This chapter gives them a role: they were the parents at the center of a staged family migration. Chapter 3 now follows the son sent ahead, Hans Peter Peterman, and the Pennsylvania land called Whiskey Mill.