The Shrum Family from Germany
"There has been a cruel, destroying angel among the travelers this year for the number of those who died so far on the voyage and here has reached about 2000.”
"The throngs of people who let themselves be seduced this year to come into the country are raising much lament here. Besides, as so many hundreds died from sickness aboard ships at sea, the survivors, if there is any left of a family, must pay or go into service which causes so much indigence and privation…."
"The stench alone is so horrible on the ships, and with the people who came from them…. That has made the inhabitants shy away from the diseased people."
"This ship lost near 160 persons, and another one that arrived the day before, more than 150…."
So wrote residents of Germantown, Pennsylvania in a collection of correspondence they published in 1738. They wished to let their countrymen (in the Rhineland-Palatinate region of today’s Germany), know that emigration conditions, always risky, were in that year untenable.
The so-called Palatine Germans had been sailing to the English colonies for three decades by then. It was a migration encouraged at first by the British who wished to populate their lands, and later by shipping companies who prospered from the passenger trade on the westbound journey.
The people from this long unstable region sought relief from the aftermath of endless war, over taxation, forced military inscription, and some from religious oppression.
When early emigrants succeeded in the colonies, more and more dared the perilous journey to make a stake for themselves or join relatives. The majority of Palatine emigrants headed for Pennsylvania. The land opportunities in “Penn’s Sylvania” were tantalizing: 5 pounds sterling would buy 50 acres of prime Pennsylvania land.
Each year ships sailed from the colonies to Northern Europe loaded with goods and returned with would-be settlers. Many of these pledged several years’ work to pay for passage after arrival. The 1737 season had traffic so good that shipping companies hired recruiters known as “Newlanders” to boost emigration from the Palatinate even more. But the travelers left home so early in the spring of 1738, and in such great numbers that the shipping companies were overwhelmed.
Among the thousands who wished to travel to the colonies were our ancestors, Johann Jacob Schram and Anna Maria Kreafer Schram and at least some of their ten children. (Some researchers give her name as Anna Maria Stoker).
Their 1738 journey was an odyssey that might take six-months. It began with nearly six weeks’ slow travel down the Rhine to Rotterdam or Amsterdam. Rhine boats from Heilbronn to Holland had to pass inspection at 26 custom houses. Delays in this journey could diminish slim travel funds before the emigrants even reached Holland.
Outside Rotterdam city limits that year, passengers squatted in makeshift camps near the ruins of a cathedral until ships arrived to take on passengers. Here the wait was long and the Dutch were alarmed by the hoards of emigrants seeking passage. The Palatines were poor, under-housed and underfed. Illness took hold among the stranded travelers. Deaths left orphans on Dutch hands and illness threatened to spread to the population of the town.
Our Schram ancestors finally boarded a ship called the Davy and left from Amsterdam. All ships sailing for the English colonies were required to pass through an English port such as Cowes. There they met further delay of one or two weeks while ships passed inspection and captains watched for favorable sailing conditions. The right winds could get a ship to Philadelphia in seven weeks. But it could take up to twelve weeks if the winds were uncooperative.
The ocean voyage was the last but toughest part of the journey and for so many in 1738, it was a fatal voyage. Extremely crowded conditions, lack of proper food and water, and illnesses such as dysentery, scurvy, typhoid, and small pox created misery and death. Children were the first to become ill and died in great numbers.
“Last Saturday arrived here the ship Davy from Holland with Palatinates (from Germany). The Captain with both mates and 160 passengers died on the passage, and the Carpenter brought in the vessel…”
Pennsylvania Gazette of October 26, 1738
The Schrams and their eldest sons, Jacob, Georg, Theo (David) and Nicholas (Nickel), were among the survivors. It is estimated that the journey from Holland had taken the Davy between 90 and 140 days.
Johann and Georg were well enough to leave the ship upon landing and swear the required oath of allegiance to England. But the Schrams had ten living children at the beginning of 1738. It is unclear if the entire family attempted the passage. Johann Jacob’s 1748 will named only the four eldest sons and another born in Pennsylvania. What became of the other six children? They either died on the horrible journey to the colonies or were left in the Palatinate and never joined their parents. The first sad possibility seems most likely.
York
The town of York, Pennsylvania, 80 miles west of Philadelphia was the frontier in 1738 and it was there that the Schrams settled. A grave marker is found in Prospect Hill Cemetery in York for Anna Maria and Johann.
Their sons, with the exception of Georg, eventually moved away from York, further west and south, getting closer to the newest frontier and the best opportunity. Nicholas, our direct ancestor, moved to the Palatine German settlement of what is now Lincoln County, North Carolina.
The family slowly adopted alternate spellings of Schram: Schrum, Schram, Shrom and Shrum. Nicholas' descendants today in North Carolina are found with both Schrum and Shrum surnames. Most from his line who later settled in Tennessee and Missouri use the Shrum spelling.
Anna Catherine Koener married Nicholas in 1749 in York. Perhaps it brought great joy to Anna Maria, who had lost all of her own daughters so tragically, to greet Anna Catherine’s first four children, all daughters, born before their grandmother’s death in 1754.
Carolina
Nickel’s family moved to North Carolina around 1765 and set deep roots there. After Anna Catherine died in 1772 Nicholas married Margareta Kelmic and had a second large family.
The will Nicholas made in 1791 gives an excellent view into both the holdings and concerns of this Shrum ancestor. It provides mainly for his second family, as Anna’s children are by then grown. But the detail in the will suggests that great thought and love have gone into Nicholas’ plans for the family he would soon leave behind.
He tells his son Henry how to care for the widow Margaret when Henry comes of age and inherits the property. Nickel’s instructions are so clear and touching that lyrics for a romantic ballad might be made from them: “… build her a good decent house with two floors, chimney and door at any convenient spring where his mother sees cause, and keep her in constant firewood… giving her yearly … fifteen bushels of wheat, ten of corn and five of rye, two hundred weight of good pork, one hundred fifty weight of good beef, and sow and plow half an acre of good ground in flax for her yearly”. Should she marry again Nicholas wanted Margaret to take with her a good horse, saddle, bed and spinning wheel.
The smallest girls were left young heifers, the little boys shillings and the education of the younger ones is carefully outlined. I cannot help but wonder how much the traumatic voyage with his family to America and its great losses impacted Nickel. In his last will and testament, he poignantly strives to shield his own brood from loss.
Missouri
Nicholas’ executor and second eldest son was Johann Jacob. He married Katrina Shetley in 1789. Their son John Jacob (great-great grandfather to my generation), was born in North Carolina in 1797. In that same year, young North Carolinian, George Frederick Bollinger, and his hunting buddy, John (Moose) Mussgenug, saddled their horses and took a long ride west. They stopped at the small Spanish outpost of Cape Girardeau in the Upper Louisiana Territory on the west bank of the Mississippi River.
Louis Lorimier, the Commandant of the post, met Bollinger and liked him, seeing in him leadership possibilities. Anxious to encourage more settlement in the area he offered Bollinger a very large tract of land on the condition that he recruit other North Carolina colonists to come to Cape Girardeau. The Spanish offered 640 acre tracts for about $40 to settlers who would make improvements and stay.
George Bollinger went back to North Carolina and recruited for Lorimier’s frontier outpost. In late 1799 Bollinger led twenty families from the German immigrant settlement of North Carolina to the Louisiana Territory where they settled what would eventually become Bollinger County, Missouri.
Johann and Katrina Shrum were among the original group. Their daughter, Clementine, was born in Cape Giradeau before the end of ‘99. Daughter Elemine, their last child, was born there in 1801. Before the settlers had been on the river for three years, the territory had passed from Spanish hands to Napoleon Bonaparte and finally to the Americans with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. When Johann Jacob Shrum planted his third season of crops on the west side of the Mississippi Thomas Jefferson was still President of the United States.
John Jacob married Rachel Myers in Cape Girardeau in 1815. Their son, Nicholas went up the river and married Editha West in Adams County, Illinois in 1861. They settled in Saverton, Missouri. Their daughter, Agnes, known by the family as ‘Perk’, married the widowed John Doak Calvert and was the mother of Vincent Calvert. Agnes’ younger sister, Maggie Etta, married John’s son Eugene, from John’s first marriage.
The beginnings of the Shrum family in America were tragic and painful. Perhaps they were hounded by ‘destroying angels.’ But it seems that better angels blessed them thereafter for the descendants of the original Johann and Anna Maria flourished in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana, Missouri and the far west. Generations of Shrums were able to gamble and win in the very high risk proposition of pushing far into the American frontier.
(Follow this link to read Nicholas’ will at distant cousin Mel Shrum’s website. He is one of the Shrum researchers who have done a lot of work. http://members.tripod.com/melshrum/lastwillofnicholas.htm)
