Philips. Lots and lots of Philips.

A few weeks ago, I came in contact with a distant cousin, Philip Hodges. We share a great-great grandfather, David Philip Dean. I sent a short email laying out the history of the name "Philip" in our family. I realized I'd never written it up for this blog, so here it is:

The first known Philip in our direct ancestry was Johannes Philip Welsheimer. "Johannes" was his baptismal name. Normally, this name is not used except in legal and religious contexts. So, he would have been known as "Philip". Philip was born around 1730 in Berlin and immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1766. He was one of a surprisingly large number of "Pennsylvania Dutch" to enter that colony in the early to mid 1700's. This article discusses some of the legal and practical barriers that were put in place to ensure the new Germany-speaking settlers wouldn't change the essentially English character of the colony. Whatever his reasons for emigrating, he was dedicated to his new country and eventually served in the Revolutionary War as a gunsmith. 

His son, also named Philip, immigrated to the U.S. with his father. He was born in 1757 in Berlin, which made him 9 at the time of immigration. He may have been the only family member to come with Philip I, or he may have had a brother named Frederick. It's also possible that a wife or daughters were present but not considered important enough to record. Philip II was a stocking weaver. His original apprenticeship papers have been preserved. They were drawn up between his father and a stocking maker named Adam Edleman in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in 1770. The name Edleman suggests that the Welsheimers were part of the German-American community in Pennsylvania and may have preferred to make important deals, like apprenticeships, with fellow Germans. Philip II eventually married a woman named Catherine Hull whose ancestry I have not been able to trace but may have been a member of the Hull/Holl family, a Germany Dutch family involved in cloth manufacturing. Regardless of his feelings about his fellow Germany immigrants, he, too, served in the Revolutionary War, in the 3rd Battalion of the York County Militia. 

Philip II was quite successful and bought a good deal of land in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West Virginia. In July of 1811, he left home in Cumberland township, Pennsylvania, to walk to the coast where he planned to find a ship headed back to Germany. He wished to buy high-quality looms there that he could not purchase in the United States. However, he died of (apparently) natural causes en route to the ship. His body was found weeks later on the road. 

Philip Welsheimer III was the son of the stocking weaver. He was born in 1791 in what is now West Virginia. He grew up there, was a successful farmer, and married Catharine Duley. Their family Bible was the subject of a previous post on this blog. He moved his family from West Virginia/West Pennsylvania to South Salem, Ohio in the 1830s. He died there in 1864. South Salem is where the Dean family was living, as well. Philip's daughter, Anna, married Abram Dean. In 1847, Abram and Anna Welsheimer Dean moved to Des Moines, Iowa. Their youngest son was born there. He was named David Philip Dean, in honor of his grandfather. 

David Philip was the last common ancestor I shared with Philip Hodges. However, the name lives on in both lines, clearly. I'm descended from David Philip's son, Carl Philip Dean, and then Carl's son Philip Carlyle Dean. Both my father and brother are Philips. Except for Anna, who passed the name into the Dean family, we have an unbroken line of Philips back to the 1730s!