Michael Peterman
& Anna Maria

From an Ancient Village World

Mörzheim and nearby Wollmesheim formed part of the same small Palatine landscape in which generations of Petermanns lived before emigration. At Wollmesheim stands an ancient church whose surviving fabric reaches back to the eleventh century. By Michael's lifetime it had already watched over the surrounding countryside for centuries.

Peterman family archive · photographed during Greg Peterman's 2014 visit.

Another surviving building brings the story much closer to Michael's own departure. The Hirtenhaus at Mörzheim dates from 1749—the year before the Osgood voyage. Family research connects the building with George Michael Peterman, mayor of Mörzheim, who gave it for the use of the village shepherds.

Editorial note. These modern photographs are visual bridges, not evidence of a specific eighteenth-century event. They show the landscape and buildings Greg encountered during his 2014 visit to the ancestral villages.

The Crossing of 1750

Michael did not make the 1750 crossing alone. The surviving passenger material places him and his father, Hans Velten Petermann, in the family migration aboard the Osgood, commanded by William Wilkie. The ship sailed from Rotterdam, stopped at Cowes, and reached Philadelphia on 29 September 1750. Michael was twenty-three years old.

Passenger lists of this period commonly identify adult males who took the required oaths, not every woman and child aboard. Anna Elisabetha belongs in the reconstructed family group as Michael's mother, but she should not be described as a documented Osgood passenger unless a record naming her is found.

York County and a Family of Their Own

By about 1755 Michael had married Anna Maria in York County. Her maiden surname has not been established securely enough to print as fact. Together they would raise ten children whose baptisms, marriages and later migrations tied the family to a broad network of German-speaking congregations and neighboring families.

Michael's naturalization in 1765 marked another stage in the family's establishment in Pennsylvania. The following year he obtained a warrant for 150 acres in Windsor Township. The survey completed on 7 May 1767 measured 146 acres and 105 perches. The tract carried a name that would become central to the family narrative: Lovely Springs.

The farm did not stand alone. Its boundary calls placed it among the lands of George Wambach, David Brubaker and Jacob Lefever. A second, much smaller tract was surveyed for Michael in 1771 in the Manor of Springettsbury. Michael's later deed describes the two tracts together as 155 acres, one rood and 25 perches, with an additional allowance for roads and highways.

Michael ordered his real and personal estate sold after his death. At public sale, the two tracts—together with the houses, outbuildings and other improvements—were purchased by his eldest son, Henry Felty Peterman. The executors' deed, dated 5 January 1786, recorded a price of £307, 10 shillings and 7 pence. The transaction kept the home place within the family while converting the estate into money that could be distributed under Michael's will.

Life at Lovely Springs

The tax lists give the farm a measurable shape. They do not tell us what the family said around the table or whether a particular harvest succeeded, but they establish a continuing agricultural household rather than a name floating on a pedigree chart.

A holding of this size required coordinated labor. Fields had to be cleared and fenced; crops planted, tended and stored; animals fed and sheltered; buildings repaired; water carried; food preserved; cloth and clothing managed. Michael appears in the public records as landholder and taxpayer, but the household economy depended equally on Anna Maria and, as they grew, on their children.

The children's church records reveal another side of the family's world. Baptisms connected the Petermans with sponsors from neighboring families and congregations. Sponsors were not decorative names. They formed a spiritual and social network that could help a household through illness, widowhood, migration and the settlement of an estate. These records are especially valuable because they document relationships without requiring us to invent private beliefs the sources do not describe.

Revolution Comes to York County

Michael appears in York County's Revolutionary-era military organization as a private in Captain Jacob Beaver's First Company of the Third Battalion of York Associates. The record supports service within the county's organized defense, but it does not by itself establish a particular battle or campaign. The careful wording is therefore more meaningful than a generalized claim that the whole family served.

Postwar militia records add another layer. Henry Valentine and Andrew appear in York County militia material dated 1785, while family research places Jacob Peterman on the 1788 roll of Captain Thomas Brisland's company at Canonsburg. Those later dates matter: they document early-national militia service, not Revolutionary War service.

Michael's Last Year

Michael made his will on 17 July 1784. The surviving family files contain conflicting transcriptions for his exact death and probate dates, so this edition deliberately does not choose among them. What can be said securely is that Michael died later in 1784 in Windsor Township, at about fifty-seven years of age.

The will is unusually revealing because it combines affection, household necessities and strict financial instructions. Michael gave Anna Maria a cow, a chest, her bed and bedstead, pewter dishes, basin and plates, six spoons, two iron pots, a brass pan, a wash tub and an oak stand. She was also to receive the interest on one-third of the estate while she remained his widow. If that income proved insufficient, the executors could draw on the principal for her support.

To his eldest son, Henry Felty, Michael left his greatcoat, waistcoat, trousers, stockings and shoes as the customary acknowledgment of birthright, together with £5. Daughter Margaret also received £5. The remainder was to be divided equally among the eight children named in the will: Catharine Lefever, Elizabeth Hollinger, Anna Maria Millhoff, Regina, George Michael, Andrew, Jacob and John.

The will directed executors John Herbach and Henry Tyson to sell the entire real and personal estate at public sale. That instruction explains why the 1786 deed is so important: it connects the named heirs, the liquidation of the estate and Henry Felty's purchase of both tracts in one continuous legal sequence.

On 11 December 1784, the family's loss appears with unusual immediacy in the York County Orphans' Court. Regina, aged fourteen and upward, chose her mother as guardian. Anna Maria then asked the court to appoint guardians for Jacob, aged thirteen, and John, aged nine and upward. The court appointed Anna Maria and her son-in-law Jacob Lefever.

No marked grave for Michael has been identified. A burial on or near the plantation is possible, but it remains an inference rather than a documented fact. The chapter therefore preserves the distinction: Michael died in Windsor Township; his precise burial place is unknown.

Anna Maria After Michael

Anna Maria remarried Christian Winiker in York on 29 June 1786. The timing fits Michael's provision precisely: marriage ended her right to the interest reserved during widowhood, while the household goods named in the will remained hers. Later records spell her second married surname in several ways, including Winiker and Weneger.

By the early nineteenth century she was living in Maytown, Lancaster County, near the Hollinger branch of the family. Her will, written 29 March 1810, provides one of the clearest late-life records of the family. She named sons George, Andrew, John and Jacob; daughters Catharine Lefever, Rachael Strominger and Anne Marie Millhoff; left her clothing to Elizabeth Henderson; and made grandson Jacob Hollinger the principal beneficiary and executor. Her residual estate included any support still due through the estate of her stepson David Weneger. A codicil gave son Henry one English shilling.

The small cash bequests should not automatically be read as estrangement. In early wills, nominal gifts could acknowledge heirs who had already received property, lived far away or were not intended to share in the remaining estate. Anna Maria's choices nevertheless show where her later-life relationships and practical dependence were centered: Maytown, Elizabeth's family and grandson Jacob Hollinger.

Anna Maria died at Maytown on 15 November 1810, about seventy-six years old, and was buried in the Maytown Reformed Churchyard.

Ten Children, Ten Paths

The ten children of Michael and Anna Maria did not remain clustered around Lovely Springs. Their lives carried the family into other Pennsylvania counties and eventually farther west. Henry Valentine became associated with Lycoming County. George Michael established himself in the Somerset County region. Andrew eventually moved west to Indiana. Jacob appears in family research in western Pennsylvania. Through their daughters, the Peterman family became interwoven with the Lefever, Hollinger, Henderson, Millhoff and Strominger families.

From One Crossing to Another

Michael Peterman had crossed an ocean. His youngest son would cross a frontier. The distance between those two movements—Mörzheim to Pennsylvania in 1750, Pennsylvania to Ohio in 1827—contains the essential transformation of this generation.

Michael and Anna Maria's achievement was not simply that their family survived. By the time Anna Maria died in 1810, their children had begun to scatter into new communities, establish households of their own and carry the Peterman name into another phase of American expansion.