GERMANY

It is important to know social conditions in central Europe during this period to understand why so many Germans chose to emigrate to America. The Thirty Years' War, which ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, had decimated much of Germany. Casualties ran as high as 90% in areas such as the Palatinate and Franconia in northern Baravia.   Entire villages were completely depopulated. In the ensuing years, settlers poured in from other parts of Germany, Switzerland, and especially Austria to resettle these lands.  Austria, because of the Counter Reformation there, in which the ruling Catholics expelled tens of thousands of Protestants in the 17th and 18th centuries for refusing to renounce the teachings of Martin Luther.   Many of these 'Exulanten' as they were called, migrated north through mostly Catholic southern Bavaria into Franconia, where Protestants were more accepted and ample farmland was available . 

But by the early to mid 1700s these areas had become largely resettled, and it became increasingly difficult for the burgeoning population to acquire inexpensive farmland. At the same time, agents for William Penn were touring Europe promoting the Pennsylvania Colony and offering essentially free land, unlimited opportunity, freedom of religion, and the absence of military conscription.  At the same time, word-of-mouth accounts were trickling back from earlier emigrants, confirming much of what Penn's agents' sales pitches.  It was an easy decision for many Germans, although the journey itself would prove neither easy nor inexpensive.

Johann Bernhard Zentmeyer was a German.   He was likely born in a small town in northeastern Württemberg called Roigheim on the Seckach river.   'Likely' because the church records there were destroyed in a catastrophic fire in 1719, so no birth records exist for the year 1707.   However his marriage record in Bischwiller in 1739 recorded his father as 'Jacob Zentmeyer from Roigheim,’ and Jacob's death there was recorded in 1733.  Additionaly, there are civil records of Jacob selling wine in Roigheim for the years 1799 - 1702.  Recent research indicates Bernhard's parents and grandparents had previously lived in Mittelfranken, or Middle Franconia, specifically in the villages of Ammerndorf, Vincenzenbronn, and Unterschlauersbach, west of Nürnberg.