Kintzer, Künzer, Kuentzer, Küntzer
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Kintzer, Künzer, Kuentzer, Küntzer |
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| If you share one of these many variations of the Kinser name these pages may provide some answers. Why they came: To understand why these ancestors of ours would uproot themselves from home and family to travel to a wilderness land half way around the world we must know a little about the world they lived in. First a bit of history: The definition of Germany as a single country with clearly defined borders applies to less than 150 years of its' history. Not until 1871 when Prince Otto von Bismarck created a cohesive nation out of a crazy quilt of self-governing kingdoms, tiny duchies and various principalities did that definition apply. Celts occupied southern Germany long before the first Germanic tribes migrated from Asia into Central Europe. Germany became the Weimar Republic only after the first World War and that required the abdication of the last Kaiser and the overthrow of the kings of Bavaria, Saxony, and Wurttenburg. Germany first appears clearly in recorded history only after Julius Caesar tried to conquer these tribes and failed. The Romans colonized the areas south of the Danube and West of the Rhine but after the defeat of three of Augustus Caesar's best Roman legions at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 A.D. Rome made no further serious attempts to move into the Germanic territories. The peoples living within the Roman empire did adopt many Roman customs and attitudes and much evidence of the Roman occupation still exists in these areas. The period in history from the collapse of the Roman Empire-- roughly the 5th century, until the 15th century-- is often referred to as the Middle Ages, sometimes called the Dark Ages. Economic dislocation and the invasions and settlement of the various Germanic tribes in Western Europe changed the face of the Roman Empire by the end of the 5th century. For the next 300 years western Europe remained essentially a primitive culture. During this period the loose confederation of tribes began to combine into kingdoms but virtually no machinery of government existed. The only universal European institution was the church, and even there a fragmentation of authority was the rule; power within the church was in the hands of local bishops. The bishop of Rome, the pope, had a certain fatherly prominence but the elaborate machinery of ecclesiastical government and the idea of a monarchical church headed by the pope was not to be established for another 500 years. A system known as Seignorialism arose during the Middle Ages. Known in England as manorialism, this system encompassed economic, political, and social relationships between, lords or seigneurs, and their dependent peasants or serfs. In all of medieval Western Europe seignorialism was the norm. Under this system, the great landowners exercised the power of pater familias over the people on their lands. They held economic power as landlords and they often held political jurisdiction by grant or appropriation of power from the imperial government. While there were regional variations throughout Western Europe, with peak years from 1000 to 1350, the seigneurs of the noble class dominated the lives of the peasants. Whether bond or free the peasants were all subjects of the seigneurs. When the lord or his representative held court, all his peasants were required to attend, to bring their complaints before him, and to be judged for the offenses that were within the lord's authority. When the lord needed his lands plowed or his crops harvested, he had the right to his peasant's labor. By the 13th century his authority and his rights to labor were well defined in most seigneuries. From each peasant he had the right to so many days' labor each week and so many extra days during plowing, harvest, and other special times. He could build gristmills, ovens, or winepresses and require his people to use them in order to increase his income. Generally, he had the right to approve or disapprove the marriages of his people, to take a head tax from them annually, to tax their income at will, to take an inheritance tax at their deaths, and to reclaim their lands if they died without heirs. In return, the peasants, even those of servile origins, had the right to hold their land hereditarily, and although the lord might be able to give or sell them and their posterity, he then had to give or sell their lands with them. The peasants not only had certain strips of arable land in the fields of their villages, but they also had grazing rights on the common pastures and rights to fuel and building materials in the common woods and wastelands, but usually no rights to any game or fish. The secular state began to emerge, often nothing more than a genesis of national feeling. The struggle for supremacy between church and state became a fixture of European history. The period of spiritual unrest ultimately ended in the Protestant Reformation. The rise of Charles the great whom the French call Charlemagne marked a turning point in the history of Western Europe. Charlemagne's political power depended on educational reforms that used methods, and aims from the Roman past. Charlemagne was crowned emperor by Pope Leo III in Rome on Christmas day in the year 800 A. D. This act implied that Charlemagne was successor to the Roman emperors and by that papal act the Holy Roman Empire was born. In name it lasted more than a thousand years until, in 1806, Francis II of Austria renounced the title under pressure from Napoleon Bonaparte. After Charlemagne the West Franks left the empire to become the nucleus of France. The East Franks followed one of Charlemagne's grandsons, Ludwig, the German. The Emperor was left with what was called the middle kingdom between the warring East and West Franks leaving the Holy Roman Emperor largely a fiction for most of these ten centuries. In fact this idea of the Holy Roman empire created more problems than it solved as far as creating a monarchy. The Kaisers had no capital, no real source of revenue, and were politically impotent. Real power during most of these thousand years rested with the counts, dukes, electors, margraves, princes, bishops, and kings of the various German states. As Voltaire later pointed out, this German Reich was "neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire." Added to these troubles were the religious divisions that came after Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenburg. This beginning for the Reformation broke Germany into hundreds of tiny Protestant and Catholic states triggering a century of conflicts. Conflicts that eventually resulted in the Thirty Years War(1618-1648). During this war virtually every German town was sacked at least once. Seven million people died, one third of the population. In the early 1700's when our ancestors began their emigration from Europe to the American colonies they were still suffering from the aftermath of these divisions. There was neither a "Germany" nor an "Italy" on the early eighteenth century maps. Some three-hundred-odd principalities made up a confederation of Germanic states that constituted the Holy Roman Empire. The power of the empire, generally dominated by the Hapsburgs, was already on the wane. Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries held little hope for the dreams and aspirations of its' commoner citizens. Entry into the trades was guarded jealously by the guilds. Membership in a guild was passed from father to son or occasionally to another close relative. Jobs for wages were poorly paid and relatively scarce. Most of the nobles paid no taxes while extracting the maximum possible from the peasants. The abuses of the Roman Catholic Church under the influence of the militant Jesuits were no less a burden to the Protestants of much of Europe. The resurgence of the Roman Catholic church led to harsh religious persecution of the Presbyterians and other Protestants. Changes were underway, however, that later in the century, would result in Revolution in America and France. These changes had not yet come when our Kinser ancestors came to their time of decision (1720 to 1740). The voices of the young Voltaire and others were just beginning to be heard. Living under these conditions many peasants were in a persuadable mood when offered the 'land of milk and honey' by pamphlets and recruiters sent out to find the people needed to populate the empty lands of the colonies. The King of England made a huge grant of land to William Penn to pay debts owed to Penn's father. Penn established the Pennsylvania colony in the royal grant but soon realized that land alone had little value without people to inhabit it, cut the timber, plant crops, and most important of all, to buy the empty acres. Penn published pamphlets, circulated throughout Europe, soliciting people to move to Pennsylvania and sent recruiters actively enlisting immigrants. Penn's colony was unique in several respects. He offered equality to all comers regardless of rank. Greatly influenced by his contact with the Quakers Penn wrote into the opening paragraphs of the colony's Constitution a promise of religious freedom and restated the promise just as strongly in the closing paragraphs. Pennsylvania was the only American colony that offered complete religious freedom from the very beginning. Pennsylvania offered much to the German Lutherans and they accepted Penn's invitation in such numbers that laws were passed making it illegal to emigrate. Many of Penn's recruiters were imprisoned but none of these measures stopped the flow. English citizens, concerned by the large numbers of German immigrants, feared these immigrants might rebel against the King of England and declare Pennsylvania a German colony and laws were passed requiring every immigrant to swear an oath of allegiance to the King of England. Our Kinser ancestors joined this flow in the early 1700's. Once the decision was made the journey was not easy. Every passenger had to have a passport or letter of permission to leave the country, signed and witnessed by local officials. Also needed was a letter from the local pastor commending the person as a member in good standing to a church in the colonies. Many ignored these requirements and managed to slip away anyway. Again, travel was a problem. Many European roads were only muddy tracks. Most pilgrims headed to the Rhine River, traveling downstream for weeks aboard river packets. Every town along the river stopped the boats to allow customs officials to exact tolls. Twenty-eight stops on the average journey. Arriving at Amsterdam or Rotterdam the travelers then had to find a ship for the voyage across the Atlantic. Passage was not cheap and many immigrants sold themselves into bondage for five to seven years to pay the cost of passage. These passengers usually entered into a contract with the captain or ship owner and on arrival their contract was sold or auctioned to the highest bidder.  Many ships were overloaded and in unseaworthy condition. The food was poor and frequently lacking. Captains often carried supplies for a two or three month voyage but uncooperative winds might extend the voyage to four or even six months. Conditions were crowded, sleeping four or five people to the bed, on bunk beds two and three levels high. Sanitary conditions were primitive. Any disease carried aboard found excellent conditions to flourish. Burial at sea was a daily ritual on many ships. Possibly as many as one third of the thousands of Palatines (German-Swiss) who started out to the New World succumbed to diseases, hardship, and exposure during their ocean voyage and were buried at sea. Those who survived were hardy stock indeed. When they arrived these early immigrants found Philadelphia a cosmopolitan city of about ten thousand souls. A few miles outside the city the land turned to wilderness. Those who survived the rigors of the sea journey faced what was called the 'seasoning time.' Fully another third did not survive the first year. They had left a structured environment with neighbors close at hand to settle in a wilderness. The nearest neighbor might be several miles away. Fields for crops had to be torn out of the land with ax, mattock and plow. Many died, but those who did survive were truly tempered. They were independent, self-reliant and had tasted the heady flavor of freedom. Immigrants of the 1700s were called Palatines whether or not they were came from the Palatine states. They were among those called 'Deutch' or German who later became known as the Pennsylvania 'Deutch' pronounced 'Dutch'. Also some were French Huguenots, ownership of the area known as the Saare being often in dispute between Germany and France. Volume II of a series of Heraldic Guidebooks by the Swiss Heraldic Society notes a coat of arms for Kinzer in the city of Schaffhausen. Schaffhausen is located in a small bulge on the northern border of Switzerland projecting into Germany near Lake Constance.
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© R. C. Kinser Last
update February 20, 2007 |
This coat of arms image is of an old stained glass window, visible in one of the rooms in the Kuenzer family villa in Freiberg, Germany, This photo was taken by Duane Kuenzer during the family reunion in Freiburg in the mid-1990’s.
The villa was a theater/art gallery/law office at the time.
The owner
remembers it setting in the upstairs hall of the Kinser family home near
Madisonville, Tennessee and being told it belonged to John Solomon
Kinser's great-grandmother.
The Kinsers and
other devout Lutherans established a church called St. Mary's near
Madisonville, Tennessee. In 1879 John Kinser, Jr. (618) donated an acre of land for a site to
build the building, now known as St. Mary's Methodist Church. This church
maintained a German speaking pastor into the late 1800s. The original
church was built from logs but has now been replaced with a concrete block
building. John and Sussanah and several other Kinsers are buried in the
cemetery adjacent to the church.
According to the 1850 census records John Kinser, Jr.(618), the fifth son of John and Sussannah
Kinser were born in South Carolina. One researcher believes this is an
error where a census taker simply placed ditto marks under the previous
entry which listed a South Carolina birthplace thus confusing researchers
forever after. John Kinser, Jr. was quite prolific having sixteen children
by two wives. As a matter of interest, when John and several other Kinsers
were listed in the 1850 Tennessee Census the name was spelled Kinsor.
Various court documents spell the name Kinsar.