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Jus' family history. The center of things was what is today referred to as "The Old Yellow Church". Putatively "Lutheran" everybody else met there as well, and was kept track of in the Lutheran records.

If you're into genealogy read the book ~ it's about people whose names appear in those old church records ~ you'll find, though, that the writer of the book changed all the names so that no one would be embarrassed. Still, I've figured a lot of them out.

First of all, not all the Indians there are Mohawk. Bunch of them are Oneida and Canandagua who were allied with the United States. Virtually all of them were Christian and had grown up in a mixed-race community where white and Indian farmers worked side by side on mostly Onedia land.

I can place the names on the family with the 16 to 20 children ~ and probably 50% of their descendants! The source data clearly shows the baby count in that family was a dynamic, ever-changing situation.

The reviewer at the time thought the Cherry Valley/Canajoharie region was mostly German, and who wouldn't think that about the folks from Herkimer, but in reality the Germans were a distinct minority. Move-ins from Pennsylvania from the New Sweden colonies (see York PA, Elkton MD, Elkins WV, etc.) were very represented in the Lutheran records ~ it's always wrong to assume a Lutheran has to come from Germany. Back in the mid 1600s most of the Lutherans in the Colonies were coming from Scandinavia. In 1700 when Penn began bringing in English Quakers to Eastern PA, the Scandinavians fled to the West and North. They were cutting trees in the area long before the Palitinate Germans reached Palatine Bridge.

And then there were the fur traders ~ composed variously of Mohicans, Huguenots, mixed race people, and so on.

Sure enough when the Revolution hit this area the people had to defend their communities, but the higher order politics had been settled long before when the English drove them from Eastern Pennsylvania, or, worst of all, when the English ships brought Germans to America and then the English transported them to a raw wilderness along the Mohawk.

The English also forced the Iriquois Confederation to cover the fires of their council rings. Their country died and they fell to conducting war against their own relatives ~ with Mohawks and Seneca slaughtering fellow clan members in Oneda and Canandagua.

Not good at all.

In 1939 the reviewer shows the bias of his time ~ the Indians were simply a fixture! Today we know better.