German, Swiss,Dutch,French and other Immigrants to Pennsylv

Today, genealogical research is easy. Well, it's easier than it has ever been. So much is online. In the old days, people had to clomp from courthouse to courthouse, archive to archive. And then manually type all the information into a book that would then be hand typeset. Full respect should be given to the genealogists that left us with such incredible records. 

This is real obvious when you see the book, "A Collection of Upwards of Thirty Thousand names of German, Swiss, Dutch, French and Other Immigrants in Pennsylvania from 1727-1776". Israel Daniel Rupp collected all the ship manifests for all the ships that arrived into Pennsylvania, and then made lists of the people on the ship manifests, and then published a book of all the person on the ships that arrived between 1727-1776.

I think most Americans might find an ancestor on one the ship manifests. The tricky part of working with this text is, it is literally, one ship manifest at a time. When I came across this master piece I began noticing a super abundance of Jewish surnames on this book of immigrants. Thus began my 1727-1776 Hidden Jewish Ancestry project. First I put all the names from all the ships into a spread sheet. Then I made a different spread sheet of all the known German Jewish surnames I could find. I then merged the files to find matches. There were thousands of direct matches. 

One of the things you hear in America is, Miller can be a Jewish name or a Christian name. And that would be true in America. Based on looking at all the combined data, it might be more accurate to say, in America, Miller BECAME both a Jewish and a Christian name. I have a feeling many of the Millers you will find on this list were Jewish in Germany and then made other plans when they got to America.

Below you will find all the immigrants that entered Pennsylvania, between 1727-1776, who had a known German Jewish last name. Were they all Jewish? Hard to say. But, logic dictates many of them were Jewish. I will warn you in advance, it's a lot of names. It's in a PDF and the total number of pages is 298. The best way to find you ancestors would be to put them in the search bar and see where they pop up. 

Below the PDF file you will find some photographs of the book. My Winkler ancestors arrived on the Neptune. You will see those pages from the book. An arrow points to my ancestors. You can find your ancestors on the PDF, but, if your family started they American journey in Pennsylvania, you might want a copy of the book. 

BUT if you find an ancestor on the PDF below, you might have found your source of Hidden Jewish Ancestry.