Immigration Points for the Wagners

Immigration and the power of exponential growth

When I started this research, I was trying to answer one narrow question: when and from where did my family first enter the United States? From that has sprung all of these people and all of this history.

But today I wondered how far I have come in answering that question.

To start, I should mention the challenge of exponential math. This never occurred to me when I began this search.

Descendents grow exponentially going backward. For every generation back, each person has two parents. So depending upon how many generations we are talking about, the formula for # of people is:

2 to the power of x, x being the number of generations.  So I have 

2 to the first parents 
2 to the 2nd grandparents
2 to the 3rd great grandparents, etc.

The way I have things organized in my mind, each of us has 4 lines of family, two from our father and two from our mother. This assumes we make a new tree for each of our grandparents. At least this is the way I have chosen to organize things. 

For my grandmother's parents, for example, the family I knew best as a child, I call that the Ellis/Krumm tree and to date that tree has 1,000 people and about 300 photos in it, not to mention all sorts of other source materials. These people are the ancestors of my grandmother on my mother's side, and are one of four lines in my family.

How this plays out with the Wagners

Now I started out thinking that I would deal strictly with Wagners in this tree.  I knew that the Rubrechts ran deep, and that scared me a little. But it did not take long for me to be dragged into the Rubrecht quagmire, partly because the Wagner side ended fairly quickly with an 1845 immigration from Germany (I am now finding that it may have been even later, in 1868). Data is conflicting,

The Rubrechts/Kellers are another deal entirely. Without looking very hard, I was able to go back 8 generations multiple times. Here's what that means:

If Ed is 8 generations down from the original families (and there are lots of them), he has

2 to the 8th

direct parents/grandparents. That comes to 256. This does not count siblings, inlaws, cousins, etc. which makes number counts in these trees really high.

But we have eliminated half of them (the ones from his mother's side). Virginia's family would be another tree (or two trees, really). We are down to 128. 

If I had stuck with the Wagners, this would be easy. That would take numbers down to 16 for the four generations living here after immigration. I know that the Wagners immigrated in the 4th generation up from Ed (August's parents were immigrants). I have data on the Wagners going back to the 6th generation, but the last two were in Germany. We know definitively that August's parents came here from Baden. So that line has a limited number of grandparents, at least American ones.

Even the Rubrechts have a manageable line so far. They go back 6 generations only and I have not found the immigration point yet. The names are Rubrecht and Fusselman and so far are all Pennsylvanians. 

But John Rubrecht married Sarah Keller (Alice's parents), and the Keller line runs very deep in American history.  Not only can I find data going back 8 generations, but I can find that data for multiple branches. The  Millers, Kellers, Klines, etc are very well documented. 

I could find no one in that entire line who married outside of the German heritage. and virtually no "recent" immigrants. There might be some, but I have not found them yet. And the further back I go, the less likely that people married outside of their church/ethnic circle. (Now I know why all three of my children had blond hair!)

Here is a quick view of the Keller tree, for example, which would be Alice Rubrecht's grandfather Joshua Keller's tree:

It's hard to read, but I am making the point that just from that one great great grandparent, we have 6  grandparents from the 8th generation. The Miller tree looks similar (that would be Joshua's wife, Elizabeth). 

I'm trying to figure out a way to display these trees that are easy to see.  Working on that. 

Summary

The Wagners immigrated from Baden Germany in the mid-19th century. August's family was 100 % German.

The Rubrechts go back in Pennsylvania history for 6 generations, but the immigration point has not been found. 

The Kellers/Klines/Millers (and more) immigrated from Germany, but 4 or 5 generations before the Wagners did. Because each generation doubles in numbers of grandparents, we have a very large number of potential immigrants in this trail. It will take time to document all of them. So far, they all look to be German.

And last, here is Paul's SAR application, which shows at least one line of Revolutionary War activity for the Kellers. I think there are more.