Kirchenbuch

Vorwort

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The Kocherthal Records

Translated by the Reverend Christian Krahmer

THERE are few records more interesting to the people having any relation to the valley of the Hudson than what are known as „The Kocherthal Records.“ They are the records of the Palatines who fled from the ravages of the French in the beautiful valley of the Rhine in the latter part of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries. As they left the homeland most of them went down the Rhine into the Netherlands and thence to England. Queen Anne sent a small colony in 1708 which settled at Quassaick creek (Newburgh), and in 1710 a colony of some three thousand souls. These came (most of them) to West Camp in this county and to Germantown, Columbia county, New York. They were led by the Reverend Joshua Kocherthal, a Lutheran minister, and by the Reverend John Frederick Hager, a minister of the Reformed church, who had taken orders in the church of England. While on shipboard Kocherthal administered the sacraments and began the records bearing his name. They are in German with Latin captions and sentences. A lady in Kingston began to translate them for the editor of this magazine about twelve years ago, but was not able to carry the task to its completion. Through the favor of St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran Church of West Camp, New York, whose early records they, distinctively, are, they have been translated by the Reverend Christian Krahmer, pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran church of Saugerties, New York, for Olde Ulster, and we would acknowledge the courteous kindness and thoroughness manifest.