– records · – sourced facts · – logged dead ends
The evidence
Every record this history rests on, in one list: what it is, where it is held, whether you can open it for free, and what it does and does not prove. Where a record is wrong or misleading, that is written down too. Nothing here is asserted without a source.
The rule this project worked to
Read the image; never trust the index. Almost every breakthrough on both sides came from a household that a name search could not find, because a clerk or a transcriber had mangled the name. A sitting state legislator is filed as "Joseph Lenz, born Beirn." The head of a Duquesne household is filed as "George Twick." A Dutch family is filed as "Crammes." Never conclude a family is absent because a name search fails.
And the technique that broke two brick walls in one day
Search the wife under her maiden name, and drop the surname entirely. Dutch and German manifests routinely record married women under their maiden names, and index transcriptions of Central European surnames are unreliable enough that the surname is often the worst field to search on. The Cremers family surfaced from a search for a given name, a birth year and an arrival year, with no surname at all.
The five documents that would answer most of what is left
Nothing remaining on either side will come from an online search. These five would, and none of them is on the internet.
Every record cited
Filter by what you can actually open. Records marked free need nothing but a browser.