The grave of Benedict Tohm, Dallastown, Pennsylvania. Photograph by the author, taken on Kodak TMAX 4x5 film.
Welcome, readers. Today, I’m introducing you to Benedict.
Benedict Tohm, it’s generally assumed, emigrated from Germany in the early-to-mid-1700’s. His gravestone in Dallastown, Pennsylvania is carved in German, and given the surge of German emigrants in the eighteenth century, that makes perfect sense. He’s buried in a region of Pennsylvania that harbored a lot of German natives and their descendants, as well.
One of the most difficult things for me to achieve has been finding the origin of ancestors who came by boat to North America. Where, exactly, did they come from? And when did they come?
This has been my trouble with Benedict; even the spelling of his last name is difficult to ascertain with any certainty because, depending on the document—tax records, census, baptisms—the spelling changes. If we go by what’s on his gravestone, it’s Tohm, but in the course of my research, I’ve seen a lot of variations, and that can make things even more difficult to pin down with certainty. Especially when I’m trying to link him to his son, Jacob, who I know for sure to be my ancestor. It’s a matter of missing records, for one, like the lack of birth registrations or the censuses before 1790.
But there are three sources I’ve drawn on to be sure, or as sure as I can: baptismal records, ship manifests, and the works of historians. From this, I can get a sense of where Benedict came from, which I’ve discovered over the course of a few years. At the end of this post, I’ll share how I found these things.
Let’s start with where he’s from—or may be, I should add.
Starting at the very least with Benedict’s gravestone, we can get a close approximation of his birthdate. Information on the stones of this time are typical: they list the date of death and about how old they were, so that we have to infer the birthdate as close as we can.
So, on the 4th of April, 1806, when he died, Benedict was 85 years and 8 months, which pushes his birth back to 1720, likely around the beginning of September, though at least one historian, Helen Herritt Russell, puts his birthday at around August 4, though I’m not at all sure why. Nevertheless, we have a year, 1720.
In Europe, baptismal records are a treasure trove. One book, Deutschland Geburten und Taufen, 1558-1898—that is, German Births and Baptismals—has but one entry that comes close: on the 27th of March, 1720, Benedict Thomas was baptized in Pfullingen, in the district of Reutlingen, Würrtemberg, in what is today southwest Germany, a land that lies to the north of the Swabian Alps.
It is possible, of course, for someone in 1806 to have the date of their birth wrong. After all, record keeping was likely something not everyone paid close attention to. It would be unsurprising if people in this time period simply didn’t know their precise age—at least not specifically to the day, or even the month.
This entry in the christening record is also handy in that it provides, of course, parents’ names: the father, another Benedict Thomas, and the mother, Anna Maria. But until I can travel to Germany, I can’t know for sure—the book, I should mention, is incomplete.
Now the question is, when and how did Benedict arrive in Philadelphia?
On August 30th of 1737, the ship Samuel sailed from Rotterdam, docked briefly at Cowes, England, and continued on to Philadelphia. Among the 318 passengers documented in the ship’s manifest, all Palatines, is Benedict Tomas. His age, which the ship’s captain was ordered by law to submit, was 27, but it is possible that this was transcribed carelessly, or at the very least incorrectly. In the facsimile of the original document, an inked scribble left by Tomas indicates “his mark,” suggesting the young man was, to some degree, illiterate. When he arrived at the Pennsylvania Courthouse, he again left his mark when he took two oaths to the Province of Pennsylvania, the Oaths of Allegiance and Abjuration—with one, he swore allegiance to King George the Second, and in the other renounced Roman Catholicism.
There is another record from September 15th, 1749 which documents the signatures of some of the 380 passengers imported to Pennsylvania in the ship Edinburgh that sailed from Rotterdam via Portsmouth under James Russel. Among those names is Benedictus Thom, the signature nearly inscrutable, with no age recorded.
One of these men is my ancestor. The name on the stone he is buried under is Benedic Tohm.
Records indicate Benedict came alone, though it’s difficult to tell: women’s and children’s names were not recorded in the ship logs. He is said to have been born in the Rheinland-Pfalz, and Pfullingen is part of that region. He may have been a member of the Lutheran or Reformed churches. Though it is possible that he paid for his passage across the Atlantic outright, it is as likely that he came as an indentured servant—a “redemptioner,” as they were known among the Germans—though there is evidence of neither possibility. In either case, he was likely found by the shipowner who sent agents among the peasants along the Rhine. At any rate, he would have gone west into Pennsylvania toward counties where the Germans were already well-established: York, Berks, Lehigh, Lebanon. He traveled, as all immigrants did, on foot.