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Neigel Family Photo Gallery |
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Early History Of The Neigel Family |
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“The man who takes no pride in his ancestors is not likely to have his descendants take any pride in him.”
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Early History Of The Neigel Family
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| If you will join me in a trip back in time we will find ourselves in Germany when it was made up of many small principalities, the holdings of major officials, or the nobility, all of whom warred with each other. The peasants owed their allegiance to the individual landholders. They farmed the land but did not own it; they tended the herds and flocks but did not own them. They usually were completely dependent on the landowner for their very existence |
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Russian promises- Catherine's invitation
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| Because of their precarious existence and sparked, perhaps, by the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) between the Catholics and the German Protestants, groups of Germans, mainly from the Palatinate, had left in 1709 for the Carolinas in North America. In 1714, a group went to Pennsylvania and in 1751 a large group went to Massachusetts; it was only after the Manifesto of Catherine the Great, in 1763, that the wave of immigration from Germany to Russia began in earnest. Catharine promised free land, freedom of religion, exemption from military service and from taxes to all German farmers who would settle in the Ukraine. She promised they would be able to retain their own language and customs and would be given help in getting established. Perhaps the most luring of those promises was the prospect of owning their own land; the German farmers were willing to endure almost any hardship in order to attain that goal. |
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| At first the German Emperor refused a mass emigration out of fear that Germany would be depopulated; however many families continued to leave secretly, stealing away in the night. Then it was realized that the majority of the emigrants were the impoverished peasants and those who were gravely in debt with little prospect of paying their debts. Emigration began to be looked upon as the solution to a problem of famine caused by several years of crop failures due to bad weather and consequent shortage of land sufficient to produce food for the existing population. From then on, they left openly and were encouraged to do so. |
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Neigel Family Site Application |
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