Early Remsharts and Their Kin
Nerenstetten
The Remsharts and their in-laws were all members of the “Georgia Dutch” who settled in Ebenezer in the mid-18th century. The Swabian village of Remshart, now part of Bavaria, dates to at least the 12th century. Ten or so miles west of Remshart, across the Danube, lie several cities and towns,, including Ulm, Langenau, and Nerenstetten, where Remsharts are recorded from the 16th century onward. Indeed, it is only in this small area that there is any trace of the Remshart family before the 18th century, when they begin to spread out across Southwest Germany.
Daniel Remshart (21 May 1710 – 29 Oct 1767) was born in the small town of Nerenstetten, about 10 miles north of Ulm, the son of Johannes Freidrich Remshart and the grandson of Johann Ulrich Remshart. He and his wife Margaretha had 13 children, 10 of whom seem to have died in childhood. In 1751, Daniel, his wife, and 3 surviving children, along with other families from Nerenstetten, including the Gnanns and (probably) the Oechslins (now spelt Exley), left for America, arriving in Georgia in October aboard the Antelope.
They settled in Ebenezer, where his son Johann (5 Oct 1738 – 20 Nov 1782) married Anna Margaretha Mueller (d. 31 Jan 1773), daughter of Johann Paul Mueller and Appolonia Kroeder. Johann Mueller was the son of Friedrich Wilhelm Mueller and his wife Anna Christina.
Frederick William Muller (d. 1751), arrived in 1736 as a clockmaker from Frankfurt. In 1738, [Rev. Martin] Bolzius lamented that “we have no carpenter or cabinetmaker in the community” and “the clockmaker Mueller is applying himself to such work and makes everything very neatly and industriously...He works not only in wood but also in bone, iron, and other tractable things.” Two years later, Bolzius noted that Muller was “a very skillful man, who can copy almost everything he sees, and he is making such spinning wheels for the people.” By 1741, Muller had made six wooden clocks for Governor James Oglethorpe and operated a lathe producing buttons and knife handles “as good as in Germany.”
The Muellers reached Georgia on the London Merchant in February of 1736 in a group consisting largely of Salzburgers. Most of the Salzburgers who came to Ebenezer made their way through southern Germany, where the story of their expulsion and exile caused a great stir in protestant regions. Among those who took note of this was the silversmith Abraham Remshart of Augsburg- undoubtedly a cousin of the Remsharts 30 miles to the west across the Danube- who produced a series of medallions commemorating the Salzburg saga. One can speculate that the interest in the
Salzburgers among the Remshart family may have played a role in Daniel's decision to emigrate to Ebenezer, rather than to Pennsylvania, where most emigrants form southern Germany went in the 18th century.