The Sturms, Members of the Reformed Church

My mother's first known ancestors are Sebastian Sturm and his wife, whose maiden name was Closs but given name has been lost in the sands of time. Sebastian was born about 1610 in the town of Schifferstadt, located in the area now called Rhineland-Palatinate. Photos show a charming place full of old half-timbered buildings, so quaint that one suspects its inhabitants still bustle about in dirndls and lederhosen. The entire state is one of West Germany’s jewels: “An authentic treasure-trove of romantic castles, friendly locals, and exquisite wines”. Rieslings, to be precise. In short, it’s postcard-worthy.

Eltz Castle in Rhineland-Palatinate
Source: erdekesvilog.hu

The Sturms initially enjoyed living there, and must have easily supported the many children each generation produced. Believe me, we are only a few among their thousands of descendants. It is unclear how many generations of Sturms lived in Schifferstadt before Sebastian, but I’ve mused they may have wandered in as the last ice sheet receded.

Sebastian’s son Johann Peter (1630) and his frau Anna Barbara remained in their pretty little burg, as did their grandson Christian and his bride Anna Barbara, daughter of Paulus Gah. Christian’s son Johann Jacob was born in Schifferstadt in 1722, but by that time religious strife was in the air and ended the German idyll for our branch of the Sturms.

The Reformed Church had started in Switzerland and spread into every corner of Europe, although opposed by Inquisition fiends and rabid Jesuits committing “awful atrocities” (according to an old Reformed document I stumbled across). Although the new sect appealed to the previously Catholic Sturms, for many years their peaceful existence in the Palatinate was spared because its Elector Frederick III was Reformed himself. But after his death, really nasty religious wars ravaged the land and finally a series of Catholic princes gained power in the area. Naturally they persecuted members of the Reformed Church in every possible way: forbade them to practice their faith, undermined them economically, and threatened them with imprisonment with a tad of torture thrown in for good measure. Schifferstadt was no longer the Garden of Eden.

A young German Reformed schoolmaster from the Rhineland Palatinate realized his homeland was a lost cause and journeyed to the Maryland colony, where in 1745 he founded “Frederick Town” as a haven for his beleaguered countrymen. Our several times great-grandfather Johann Jacob Sturm followed him in 1749 on a ship from Rotterdam via Cowes, changing his name to “John Storm” in the process. The ship’s log waspishly identifies him as illiterate.
Frederick, Maryland must have been an exciting place to live. Its primary language remained German until 1846, when a flood of starving Irish immigrants changed the town’s demographics. Numerous refugees from Deutschland’s various kingdoms and principalities paused there before they migrated westward and became “Pennsylvania Dutch”. It was also a stopping place along a route that led down into the “Great Valley”, which we now poetically call the Shenandoah.

Johann and his German-born wife Mary Elizabeth Tanner/Donner (this is uncertain) eventually joined many other ethnic Germans in following an old Indian trail into Pennsylvania. They settled around Conewago (an Indian word meaning (“place of the rapids”) township where they had a daughter Maria in 1765.