A useful resource for finding ship records of early German immigrants to Pennsylvania are the books published in three volumes, "Pennsylvania German Pioneers", by Ralph B. Strassburger and William J. Hinke, 1934. (Click here to access the book's index and all three volumes for your own research).
My interest in this book is to locate information about my Reese ancestors. I used the index to find Reeses who arrived at Philadelphia between 1727 and 1808. I found several arriving between 1747 and 1803, and copied snippets of the pages, shown here:
The earliest Reese in my family tree so far is George Rees (or Johann George Rees/Reese), who supposedly married Magdalene Zerr in Pennsylvania before 1788. He was born about 1750 in Pennsylvania and died in 1832 in Madison, Columbia County, Pennsylvania.
I returned to the index and found one entry for Zerr, as follows, Johan George Zerr, who arrived at Philadelphia from Rotterdam and Cowes in August of 1750:
An image of the port Johann Zerr and many others sailed from, the Harbor of Rotterdam, is shown here:
The Harbor of Cowes on the Isle of Wight is shown here:
Anyone with information on the Reese and/or Zerr families, please comment below or contact me!
Note: George & Magdalene Rees had a son named Abraham Rees, who was born in 1788, Peter, Henry, John, Joseph and George Reese.
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