Hans Nicholas Firestone (Feuerstein)

  General Notes:

Feuerstein (Firestone): the family appears first in 1660 at Dehlingen, where George Feuerstein was a mastermason. A son of the same came to Thal in 1686 and in 1719 the families continued to flourish at Berg.
Among the many Alsatian families which emigrated from Europe to America in the mid-eighteenth century were the Feuersteins of Berg, a farm village forty miles northwest of Strasbourg. Though Germans in customs, language and religion, they were French subjects and the men were liable for conscription into the French army. Contracting their services as farm laborers in exchange for ship passage, many Alsatians migrated to Pennsylvania. Once qualifying for entry at Philadelphia, they generally disappeared from record for several years, to later reappear as farm owners, to anglicize their names, to intermarry with Pennsylvania German or Alsatian families, and after the Revolutionary War to migrate to Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, and other states. This account is based upon original documentary sources and family records.
These towns were erected to house early Huguenot refugees from France. According to unsubstantiated Firestone family tradition, however, the German speaking family came to this part of Alsace from the Bregenz Forest, Province of Vorarlberg, in the Austrian Tyrol in the 15th century. Because of the loss by fire of the Berg Lutheran Church Records in 1720, it has not been possible to trace the ancestry of Hans Nicholas Firestone. He and Catharina Nunnemacher were married on 10 April 1733 at the Berg Lutheran Church, at which the births of most of their children were recorded . Known as Nicholas, he was a carpenter and farmer. According to family tradition, when their oldest son became subject to conscription into the French army, they abandoned their ten-acre farm and went to Holland. With his wife and children Nicholas sailed from Rotterdam on the ship Peggy, Captain James Abercrombie, Master, arriving at Philaadelphia 24 September 1753 and qualifying for entry the following day. According to family tradition, he indentured himself and his sons as farm laborers in Lancaster Co. Pa, in exchange for ship passage. By 1760 the family settled in Paradise Twp., York Co. Pa., in which Nicholas acquired a 300-acre tract adjoining the Pigeon Hill.

Hans married Anna Catharine Nunnemacher, daughter of Marchels Nunnemacher and Anna Catherina, on 10 Apr 1733 in Berg Lutheran Church, Berg Germany. (Anna Catharine Nunnemacher was born on 2 Aug 1711 in Berg. Germany and died between 1759 and 1761.)