# The Immigration and Community Story of Andrew Cleburne Young's Family

*Synthesized from `Andrew_Cleburne_Young_Ancestors_10gen.md` and the `Young Family Tree.ged` GEDCOM (including ancestor notes, census abstractions, immigration events, and the "History of Schumannsville" media record). Generated 8 May 2026.*

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## Overview: Four Streams Converging in Texas

Andrew's American family is essentially the story of **four distinct immigration streams** that, after winding their way across the continent for as much as two centuries, all converge in Bexar County, Texas, between roughly 1880 and 1920. By the time Andrew's grandparents are born in the 1910s and 1920s, the whole tree is rooted in San Antonio and the Texas Hill Country, but the threads that wove that knot stretch back to four very different European worlds:

1. **The Texas-Hill-Country Germans (and one Dane)** — most of the maternal-maternal side. Arrived in Texas directly from the German states (and Denmark) in the 1840s and 1850s as part of the Adelsverein migration that founded Fredericksburg, New Braunfels, Luckenbach, and Schumannsville.
2. **The Ulster Scots (Scotch-Irish)** — a large share of the paternal and the maternal-paternal sides. Came over the Atlantic between roughly 1730 and 1775 through Philadelphia or Charleston, drifted south down the Great Wagon Road, and ended up in the Carolina–Tennessee–Alabama–Arkansas backcountry before pushing into Texas after the Civil War.
3. **The Pennsylvania-German Moravians and Reformed** — the Hauser/Hooser, Fiscus, Schaefer, and Moser lines. Came from Alsace, the Palatinate, and Switzerland in the 1720s–1740s, settled around Lancaster County and Skippack in Pennsylvania, and then helped found the Moravian settlement of Bethania in North Carolina in 1759.
4. **The deep-colonial English** — a smaller but very early thread (Young of Northumberland, Stuart of Kent, Podd of Lincolnshire, Stevens of Middlesex). Arrived in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas in the late 1600s and early 1700s and were already "American" before the Revolution.

The remarkable thing about Andrew's tree is that **every immigrant ancestor in it eventually ended up in Texas, or has a child or grandchild who did**. The German Hill-Country families and the Anglo-Celtic frontier families followed completely different routes for two hundred years and only met in San Antonio in the early 20th century — and that meeting is, in a real sense, what produced Andrew's family.

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## 1. The Texas Hill Country Germans (and One Dane)

This is the most concentrated and best-documented immigrant cluster in the tree. Roughly **a quarter of Andrew's 10-generation ancestry** ended up in Fredericksburg or its satellites — Luckenbach, Johnson City, New Braunfels, and Schumannsville — between 1845 and 1855. The GEDCOM associates **134 individuals** with Fredericksburg, Texas. Almost all of them are entangled with each other through marriage within a generation or two of arrival, which is the unmistakable signature of an isolated immigrant colony.

### The Adelsverein context

In 1842, twenty-one German noblemen formed the *Mainzer Adelsverein* (the Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas), which between 1844 and 1847 chartered ships to bring thousands of German emigrants to the Republic — and then the State — of Texas. They landed at Karlshafen (renamed Indianola) on Matagorda Bay, were trekked inland by ox-cart, and were settled first at New Braunfels (founded 1845 by Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels) and then at Fredericksburg (founded 1846 by John O. Meusebach). It was a logistical disaster — many died of cholera, dysentery, and exposure on the coast and the road — but the survivors built one of the most distinctive ethnic enclaves in 19th-century America: a German-speaking, largely Lutheran (with substantial Catholic and freethinking minorities) farming republic in the limestone hills west of San Antonio.

Almost every single one of Andrew's German ancestors fits this pattern.

### The German immigrant ancestors

Out of the GEDCOM, the following direct ancestors landed in Texas in the Adelsverein-era German wave:

| Generation | # | Name | From | To |
|---|---|------|------|-----|
| 5 | 56 | Peter A. Staudt | Nassau (Rhineland-Palatinate) | Fredericksburg |
| 5 | 58 | Peter Jung | Nassau / Bavaria | Fredericksburg |
| 5 | 59 | Wilhelmina "Minna" Hetzel | Nassau | Fredericksburg |
| 5 | 60 | Anton Novian | Nassau | Fredericksburg |
| 5 | 61 | Catharina Heinemann | Heuthen, Thuringia | Fredericksburg |
| 6 | 112 | Peter Staudt | Frickhofen, Hessen | Fredericksburg (d. 1852) |
| 6 | 113 | Katherina Weber | Frickhofen, Hessen | Fredericksburg |
| 6 | 114 | Heinrich "Henry" Donnecker | Prussia | Texas (d. abt. 1852) |
| 6 | 115 | Barbara Zenner | Losheim, Saarland | Fredericksburg |
| 6 | 116 | Philipp Jung | Oberweyer, Hessen | New Braunfels (d. 1851) |
| 6 | 117 | Anna Katharina Kunz | Frickhofen, Nassau | Fredericksburg |
| 6 | 118 | George Hetzel | Herbolzheim, Bavaria | Fredericksburg |
| 6 | 119 | Anna Maria Decker | Gross Wanzleben, Prussia | Fredericksburg |
| 6 | 122 | Georg Valentin Heinemann | Heuthen, Thuringia | Gillespie County |
| 6 | 123 | Catharina Brodmann | Heuthen, Thuringia | Fredericksburg |
| 6 | 125 | Johanna Spillner | Hanover, Lower Saxony | Fredericksburg |
| 6 | 126 | Friedrich Wilhelm Schumann | Köthen, Saxony-Anhalt | Gillespie County |
| 6 | 127 | Henriette Schupp | Duchy of Nassau, Prussia | Gillespie County |
| 7 | 253 | Charlotte Amalie Walbe Dettmar | Köthen, Saxony-Anhalt | Schumannsville, Guadalupe County |
| 7 | 254 | Wilhelm Heinrich Schupp | Gusow, Brandenburg, Prussia | Fredericksburg |

That's twenty direct ancestors who left **a swath of German-speaking territory stretching from the Saarland in the west, through Hessen and Nassau in the center, north to Hanover and east to Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg** — and ended up the same year, in the same Texas county, on the same Adelsverein wagon trains.

### A founder of his own town: August Wilhelm Schumann (#252)

The single best-documented Adelsverein arrival in the tree is also the most consequential. The "History of Schumannsville" by Walter F. Rudeloff (1985), preserved as a media record in the GEDCOM, describes Andrew's 5th-great-grandfather **August Wilhelm Schumann*** as

> "a well-to-do German immigrant from Köthen, West Prussia, [who] arrived on the Texas coast aboard the SS Franziska on January 11, 1846, with his wife and 8 children."

Unlike most Adelsverein immigrants, Schumann had capital. He **bought the entire Ignatius S. Johnson Survey** — 3,188.5 acres on the southwest side of the Guadalupe River, about three miles south of New Braunfels, patented by President Anson Jones in 1846. A few months later he met a wagon train of fellow immigrants from the same region of West Prussia who had come ashore on the *SS Johanna* and other ships in December 1846. Schumann **divided about 350 acres of his land into 15 long, narrow, mile-long strips** along the river, each about 208 feet wide, and sold one to each family. The settlement that grew up there — **Schumannsville, Texas** — bears his name to this day, and his second wife, Charlotte Amalie Felica Walbe Dettmar (#253), is buried in its cemetery. The arrangement was originally an oral handshake; the deeds weren't recorded until September 1850.

This is a near-perfect microcosm of how the Hill Country was settled: a single literate, propertied family acted as a *Vorbote* (forerunner) for a chain-migration cluster, and an entire West-Prussian village reconstituted itself on the Guadalupe.

### One Dane in a German wagon train: Erasmus Frandsen (#124)

The Frantzen line in the tree looks German on paper, but it is actually Danish. Andrew's notes on **Erasmus Frandsen** (born 1813 in Staar, Haldum Sogn, Aarhus, Denmark) trace this beautifully:

> "Erasmus's father died in 1839 when Erasmus was about 26. By 1845, Erasmus was working as a landless servant (Tjenestefolk) on another farm. Perhaps the family farm went to an older sibling, or was lost after the father's death — leaving Erasmus without land or strong ties to keep him in Denmark. The marriage date of March 10, 1846 in Victoria County is very telling. Victoria is near the coast, close to Indianola (then Carlshafen) where the Adelsverein ships landed."

In other words: a young Danish farmhand with no inheritance, no land, and no future at home boarded an Adelsverein ship with the German emigrants and married Johanna Spillner from Hanover almost the day they got off the boat. Once in Texas, the family's surname slid from "Frandsen" to "Frantzen" and they were absorbed into the German-speaking Hill-Country world. By his grandchildren's generation they are indistinguishable from their German neighbors — buried in *Der Stadt Friedhof* in Fredericksburg, married to Schumanns and Novians.

### What the locations tell us about the community

Look at the death places of these Germans: **Fredericksburg** appears over and over. So does **Gillespie County** more broadly, plus the surrounding villages of **Luckenbach** (where Joseph William Novian, #30, was born in 1878) and **Johnson City** (where Helen Ruth Staudt was born in 1927 and Joseph William Novian later died). This is a characteristic *Streuhof* settlement pattern — a central market town surrounded by isolated farmsteads on creeks. The ancestors married each other for three generations before their descendants started marrying outside the German community.

That endogamy is visible in the tree itself. The Staudts intermarried with Wüsts, Webers, Lauxes, Stahls, and Kunzes — **all from the same handful of villages around Frickhofen and Dorchheim** in Hessen-Nassau. Several of these surnames repeat on both sides of one marriage (e.g., Anna Maria *Staudt* married Johann Jacob *Weber*, whose daughter Katherina Weber married back into the *Staudt* family). The pattern in Texas continues the pattern in the *Westerwald* — a tightly interwoven set of Catholic / Lutheran villages where everyone is everyone else's cousin.

The Schumann/Schupp/Dettmar cluster is the same pattern, just transplanted from Köthen and Gusow in eastern Germany to the bend of the Guadalupe River.

### The community signature

This cluster's distinguishing features are:

- **German-speaking**: the German language was used in everyday life, in church, and in the *Vereine* (clubs) of Fredericksburg well into the 20th century, and the family records still preserve umlauts and Germanic name spellings.
- **Religiously plural but observant**: the Frickhofen-area names are largely Catholic, while the Hetzel/Decker, Schumann/Schupp, and Spillner names are Lutheran. The Hill Country's three big Fredericksburg churches (Marienkirche, Holy Ghost Lutheran, Vereins-Kirche) reflect this mix.
- **Frontier but propertied**: many arrived with enough capital to buy land outright. Schumann buys 3,188 acres on arrival; the Adelsverein-contract families each got 10 town lots and farmland.
- **Loyal to the Union — quietly**: the Hill Country Germans were notoriously unenthusiastic about the Confederacy. (The Nueces Massacre of 1862 happened a day's ride from Fredericksburg.) None of Andrew's German ancestors of fighting age seem to have served in the Confederate Army, in stark contrast to his Anglo-Celtic side.
- **Insular for two generations, then assimilated**: by Andrew's grandparents' generation (Arthur Anton Staudt, b. 1902; Alma Ann Novian, b. 1904), the language is going, and the next generation moves to San Antonio for work.

---

## 2. The Ulster Scots (Scotch-Irish): Pennsylvania → Carolinas → Texas

The other huge thread in the tree is the classic **Scotch-Irish migration**. These are the Presbyterian Lowland Scots whose grandparents had been planted into Ulster (mostly in Antrim, Tyrone, Down, Donegal, and Londonderry) during the 17th-century Plantation, who then re-emigrated to America in waves between roughly 1717 and 1775 because of rack-renting, religious discrimination by the Church of Ireland, and economic depression.

### The named immigrants in this stream

| # | Name | From | To | Date |
|---|------|------|------|------|
| #192 | "Ready Money" John Houston | Co. Down (or Tyrone), Ulster | Newberry District, SC | by 1750 |
| #193 | Mary Ross | Tyrone, Ireland | Newberry, SC | with husband |
| #194 | James McCracken | Galloway District, Scotland | Madison Co., AL | by 1780s |
| #196 | Christopher Simpson | Templepatrick, Co. Antrim, Ireland | Wayne Co., KY | by 1790 |
| #392 | John Simpson | Co. Antrim, Ireland | Wayne Co., KY | with son |
| #393 | Christian Campbell | Ireland | Wayne Co., KY | with husband |
| #1039 | Grizzell Wray | Haddington, East Lothian, Scotland | Hillsborough, Orange Co., NC | early 1700s |
| #A3 | John Young | Ireland | Buncombe Co., NC | by 1790s |
| #A8 | Mary Ann Mackie | Tyrone Co., Ireland | NC | mid-1700s |
| #A9 | Robert Patton Sr. | Tyrone, Ulster | Gibson Co., TN | mid-1700s |
| #A11 | James Hemphill Jr. | Co. Antrim, Ulster | Rowan Co., NC | by 1750 |
| #A13 | John Logan Patton | Londonderry, Ulster | Rowan Co., NC | by 1750 |
| #A14 | Mary Elizabeth Anderson | Ramelton, Donegal, Ireland | Cumberland Co., PA | early 1700s |
| #A15 | William Patton | Limavady, Co. Londonderry | Marlboro, Chester Co., PA | by 1700 |
| #B9 | John Scott Sr. | Roxburghshire, Scotland | Rutherford Co., NC | by 1750s |
| #B10 | Robert Young Sr. | Antrim, Ulster | Augusta Co., VA | 1740 |
| #B11 | Agness Crockett | Antrim, Ulster | Milton, Laurens Co., SC | with husband |

Note that **two** of the immigrant Pattons (the Tyrone-born Robert Sr. and the Londonderry-born John Logan) and **two** Robert Youngs (from Antrim) appear on different branches; this is consistent with Scotch-Irish chain migration where multiple cousins of the same names ship together.

### "Ready Money" John Houston (#192)

The notes on **John Houston** are some of the richest in the tree. A note from "Liz" reads:

> "Ready Money" John Houston / Born 1728, Died 1808 / (Lee County Cemetery) / New Berry District, S. Carolina / Listed in 1790 Census / Came from County Doon (Down), Ireland with 3 sons, 2 daughters / Wife Mary Ross, died 1811.

Andrew's own notes add a discussion of whether this John Houston was related to the same "Houston" line that produced General Sam Houston of Texas — quoting an old biographical sketch which speculates that Gen. Sam Houston "believed that Gov. Geo. S. Houston and he were 'cousins,' their grandfathers being brothers... they were both 'Scotch Irish,' of the same rigid Presbyterianism, and emigrated from the same part of Ireland about the same time." This is unproven, but the family tradition that we share blood with the founder of the Republic of Texas runs deep.

The nickname "Ready Money" tells us a lot about John's standing in the Newberry community: in a frontier economy where most transactions were on credit and barter, "Ready Money" John was the man you went to when you needed cash. He's listed as a son of John Houston Sr. (#641, from the OneWorldTree-flagged note) who came over to Pennsylvania in 1735.

### Robert Young of Augusta County (#B10), the alternate paternal line

The B-line of the tree (an alternate hypothesis for the parents of #32 James Madison Young) traces back through Capt. Samuel Young of Rutherford County — a militia captain in **Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, in 1778** — to Samuel Young (#B7) of Cumberland County, PA, and beyond him to Robert Young Sr. (#B10), who shows up in some of the most well-documented immigration records in the tree:

> "On the 26th of June 1740 Robert Young proved his importation by making oath that he had imported himself and his family from Ireland to Philadelphia and from thence to this colony at his own charges... Robert Young's family consisted of Agnes [his wife], John, Samuel and James."

That's a literal court record from Orange County, Virginia (which then included Augusta), capturing the moment a Scotch-Irish family entered the Shenandoah Valley. They arrived in Philadelphia, walked or wagoned south through the Cumberland Valley of Pennsylvania, crossed the Potomac, and settled on the new frontier of Beverley Manor. Within a generation, the family had spread to Laurens, SC, Cumberland Co., PA, and later to Rutherford Co., NC, and Kentucky — a textbook Scotch-Irish "drift south."

### The McElroy/Irvine/Blythe Presbyterian intelligentsia

The **Blythe/McElroy/Irvine** branch (Andrew's 4th-great-grandfather **Rev. Dr. James Ebenezer Blythe**, #80, 1765–1842) represents the educated Presbyterian sub-stratum of this stream. James Ebenezer Blythe was a Princeton-trained Presbyterian minister who became the second president of Transylvania University in Kentucky, which is documented in the GEDCOM with a link to *Annals of the American Pulpit* (Sprague). He's buried in Hanover, Indiana — at Hanover College, another Presbyterian school. His son's son **Andrew M. Blythe** (#40) drifted south into Tennessee, and *his* son **Sidon Blythe** (#20) drifted further into the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) and finally into Texas. The educated Princeton minister thus has a great-grandson who was born in Tennessee, lived in Oklahoma, and died in Texas — a microcosm of how the Scotch-Irish backcountry produced both circuit-riding ministers and frontier farmers from the same families.

### What the locations tell us about this community

These ancestors' lives map onto a **single ethno-religious migration corridor**: the Great Wagon Road from Philadelphia south through Lancaster, the Cumberland Valley, the Shenandoah, the Yadkin, the Catawba, and into the South Carolina up-country, and from there westward through the Cumberland Gap into Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, and finally Texas. The *characteristic markers* of the Scotch-Irish frontier community are all over Andrew's tree:

- **Presbyterian church membership.** Note on Agness Crockett (#B11): "She was a Presbyterian by religious belief." The Houston biographies emphasize "rigid Presbyterianism." The Blythe and McElroy lines produce literal Presbyterian ministers and elders.
- **Militia and Revolutionary War service.** Capt. Samuel Young's company (#B3) appears on the *Return of the First Battalion of Northumberland Militia, 1st May, 1778*. James McCracken (#194) and James Houston (#48's father, James Monroe Houston's grandfather) carry **DAR Ancestor numbers** in the tree (A057646 and A075820 respectively) — meaning they have approved Revolutionary War service records.
- **Frontier county-court records.** The land patents, importation oaths, and Justice-of-the-Peace appointments in these notes are the everyday paper trail of Scotch-Irish men in newly-organized counties from Augusta, VA, to Rutherford, NC, to Lauderdale, AL.
- **Endogamy by region of origin.** Pattons marry Pattons, Youngs marry Pattons (the alt branch shows George Newton Patton #A5 marrying Nancy Patton #A6 — possibly cousins), Hemphills marry Pattons. This is exactly the pattern of Ulster Presbyterian communities that re-formed themselves block by block in Lancaster County, PA, and then re-formed again in Rowan County, NC.
- **Slow, generation-by-generation southward drift.** The Houston line: Down → PA → Newberry SC → Lauderdale AL → Phillips AR → Lee AR → finally to San Antonio with Robert Cleburne Houston (#12) about 1900. The Young line of the alternate B-tree: Antrim → Augusta VA → Cumberland PA → Rutherford NC → Buncombe NC → on to Texas.

### A specific Civil-War detail in the tree

A small but striking note attached to **Benjamin Franklin Young (#16, Andrew's 2nd-great-grandfather):**

> "Confederate Army enlistment in 1861 shows he was in Tarrant County [Texas]."

He was buried in the Confederate Cemetery in San Antonio. So at least one of Andrew's direct paternal ancestors had already migrated from North Carolina to north Texas by 1861 and enlisted on the Confederate side. He is presumably the link by which the Young surname arrived in Bexar County. Robert Cleburne Houston (#12) carries the *given name* "Cleburne" — and it can hardly be a coincidence that he was named after Major General Patrick Cleburne, the Irish-born Confederate division commander killed at Franklin in 1864. The Houston family was naming sons after Confederate heroes for at least two more generations: James Cleburne Houston Sr. (#6), Andrew's grandfather, in turn passed the name on.

This is a clean confirmation that the Anglo-Celtic side of Andrew's family was deeply embedded in the Confederate South — even as his German ancestors, two counties away in Fredericksburg, were quietly opposing it.

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## 3. The Pennsylvania Germans / Moravians (Hauser, Fiscus, Schaefer, Moser)

A third, smaller, but very early stream comes through the **Hauser** (anglicized to **Hooser**) family. Andrew's 4th-great-grandfather **Christian Hooser** (#74, 1782–c.1860) appears in **Stokes County, North Carolina**, censuses of 1820, 1830, and 1840 — specifically in the **Bethabara District** (1840). That single census entry is the smoking gun: Bethabara was the original 1753 Moravian settlement in North Carolina, and the Hauser family were Moravians.

### Martin Hauser (#296)

Christian's grandfather **Martin Hauser** (1696–1761) was born in Reichenweier, Alsace (then under French rule, now Riquewihr in Haut-Rhin, France), and married **Maria Margaretha Schaefer** of Lampertsloch in the Palatinate. The notes record that "**One of his sons died while on passage to America in 1727**" — the typical fate of the very early Palatine emigrant ships. The family settled first at **Skippack Perkiomen in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania** (where Christian's father Jacob Hauser was born in 1733), then in 1759 followed the Moravian Brethren to North Carolina, where Martin became one of the founding settlers of **Bethania**, the second Moravian town in the Wachovia tract (a few miles north of Bethabara). He is buried in Bethania Moravian Cemetery, his wife alongside him.

### The wider Pennsylvania-German web

Around the Hauser line cluster a number of other Palatine German and Swiss-German names:

- **Jacob Frederick Fiscus Sr.** (#298, b. 1707 in the Pfalz; d. 1772 in Surry Co., NC) and his wife **Anna Elisabeth Schwind** (b. ca. 1707 of Ober Saulheim; d. 1750 in Lancaster Co., PA) — the parents of Christian Hooser's wife Eleonore Margaretha Fiscus.
- **Johann Michael Schaefer** (#594) of Lampertsloch, Alsace, and **Maria Barbara Geiger** (#595) of **Rüttingen, Bern, Switzerland** — both died in Pennsylvania.
- **Frederick Moser** (#404, b. 1726 in Bavaria), whose son Johann Philipp Moser is in Berks Co., PA, then Floyd Co., IN. (The Moser/Mosier/Hickman line then turns up in southern Indiana Floyd Co. cemeteries — the Yenowine Cemetery — and Indiana censuses through the early 1800s.)

### What the locations tell us

This is the **Palatinate-to-Pennsylvania-to-Wachovia** community. The hallmarks:

- **Pietist Protestant**, and specifically **Moravian** for the Hausers (originally Lutheran before being absorbed into the Renewed Unitas Fratrum in Pennsylvania).
- **Two-step migration**: the Rhine Valley → William Penn's tolerant Pennsylvania → frontier North Carolina, often along the *Wachovia Road*, the Moravian-built track from Bethlehem, PA, to Bethabara, NC, in 1753.
- **Communal landholding and trades**, especially in the Wachovia phase. (Hans Georg Hauser of an earlier generation was recorded as a *Butcher* — one of the few occupations in the GEDCOM.)
- **Eventual fade into the surrounding population.** By Christian Hooser's generation the family is in Newton County, Missouri (1860 census), and his grandchildren are marrying Stephens family members and migrating to Texas. The Moravian distinctiveness erodes within two generations of leaving Stokes County.

---

## 4. The Deep-Colonial English

A smaller but **older** thread is the literal pre-Revolutionary English colonial migration — these are people whose ancestors arrived before the Plantation/Adelsverein/Scotch-Irish waves and whose American footprint was already two or three generations deep by 1776.

| # | Name | From | To |
|---|------|------|-----|
| #256 | John Young | Eglingham, Northumberland, England | Burke Co., NC |
| #257 | Mary Martha Stuart | Kent, England | Georgetown, Cecil Co., MD |
| #641 | Sarah Podd | Lincolnshire, England | NC |
| #144 | William Henry Stephens | Whitechapel, Middlesex, England | (lived and died in England) |
| #72 | William Henry Stevens | Middlesex, England | Kentucky, USA |
| #321 | Elizabeth Champion | Connecticut → New Jersey | (born in Colonial America) |
| #640 | Charles Christopher Blythe | Isle of Wight, England → Colony of Virginia | Chowan, NC (d. 1706) |

The **Young / Stuart / Montgomery** branch is especially interesting: John Young was born in 1711 in Eglingham, a tiny Anglo-Scottish border parish in Northumberland (the county just south of Berwick); his wife Mary Martha Stuart came from Kent. They crossed separately and met in Maryland — at **Georgetown, Cecil County**, on the upper Chesapeake. (Cecil County's Bohemia Manor and adjacent parts of the upper Chesapeake had a meaningful English Catholic minority and a substantial Quaker population; the GEDCOM doesn't record their religion, but the area was a typical mixing zone.) Their son **John Stuart Young** (#128) was born in Cecil County in 1734 and migrated south to Burke County, North Carolina, where he died in 1827, age 92. A note on him reads:

> "William M Young, my ancestor, must have been a child (maybe the last child) of John's first wife in Maryland."

That single sentence captures how mobile and how reconfigured these families were: a man born in Maryland, married twice, ends his life in the western Carolina mountains, with descendants scattered through different households.

The Charles Christopher Blythe → William W Blythe → James Blythe sequence is even older: Charles was born in 1652 in Isle of Wight, England, and **died in 1706 in Chowan, North Carolina** — so by 1700 there's already a Blythe family in colonial Albemarle. By the time Rev. Dr. James Ebenezer Blythe is born in 1765 in Mecklenburg County, the family has been in North America for three generations.

### What the English thread tells us

Andrew's English-colonial ancestors are mostly the **Anglo-Scottish borderlands and southern English** type rather than New England Puritans. (The one Connecticut-born ancestor, Elizabeth Champion #321, married into the New Jersey Blythe line; but most of the English thread came in through Maryland, Virginia, or the Carolinas, not Massachusetts.) These were the "first families" of the Carolina back-country whose grandchildren intermarried with the incoming Scotch-Irish in the mid-18th century, producing the distinctive *upland-southern* culture that absorbed the Scotch-Irish wave.

---

## How the Streams Met: Texas, 1880–1920

The four streams meet in **Texas**, specifically in **Bexar County (San Antonio)**, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

### The German consolidation in the Hill Country (1846–1900)

The Adelsverein generation lived their whole American lives in Gillespie County. Their children mostly stayed and married each other. By the third Texas-born generation — Arthur Anton Staudt (#14, b. 1902) and Alma Ann Novian (#15, b. 1904) — both still in Fredericksburg — the families are **completely intermarried within the Hill Country German community.** Their daughter **Helen Ruth Staudt** (#7, b. 1927 in Johnson City) is the first to leave the Hill Country: she marries James Cleburne Houston Sr. and moves to San Antonio, where she dies in 1994.

That marriage — Helen Staudt × James Cleburne Houston — is the moment the German Hill Country and the Anglo-Celtic Confederate South finally cross in Andrew's tree.

### The Anglo-Celtic Carolina-to-Texas corridor (1860s–1900s)

The Houston, Hickman, Simpson, Moore, McClure, Blythe, and Young lines all follow a similar arc: they're in the Carolina-Tennessee-Alabama-Arkansas frontier in the early-mid 1800s, fight in the Civil War (mostly Confederate), and then between roughly 1870 and 1910 they push into the **Texas–Indian Territory–Oklahoma frontier**.

- The **Houstons** go from Lauderdale, AL (1820s) → Phillips/Lee Co., AR (1850s–1900) → San Antonio (1900s).
- The **Blythes** go from Indiana → Tennessee → Indian Territory (Marshall Co., OK) → Texas.
- The **McClures** go from Tennessee → Grayson Co., TX (Denison) → western Oklahoma (Cordell, Chickasha, Jackson Co.).
- The **Stephens / Land** lines come from Tennessee, Georgia, and Missouri to **Richland Springs, San Saba County, Texas** by the 1880s.
- The **Youngs** come from Buncombe County, NC, to Wilson County, TX (Floresville), and from there to Bexar County by 1900.

This is the *South-to-Texas* migration that the late-19th-century railroads enabled — the Texas & Pacific, the M-K-T ("Katy"), and the Southern Pacific — and which doubled the population of central Texas between 1870 and 1900.

### San Antonio as the meeting point

By Andrew's grandparents' generation:

- **James Andrew Young** (#4, b. 1917 in San Antonio, of Buncombe-via-Wilson-Co Anglo-Celtic descent) marries **Artie Belle Blythe** (#5, b. 1916 in Cedar Mills, Grayson Co., TX, of Tennessee-Indian-Territory Anglo-Celtic-and-Cherokee-frontier descent). They live and die in San Antonio.
- **James Cleburne Houston Sr.** (#6, b. 1920 in San Antonio, of Lee Co., AR, descent) marries **Helen Ruth Staudt** (#7, b. 1927 in Johnson City, of Hill-Country German descent). They also live in San Antonio.

Their children — Patrick Robert "Bob" Young and Roberta Ann Houston — marry, and the four streams that started in Frickhofen, Köthen, Tyrone, Northumberland, and Reichenweier merge in one San Antonio household.

### Why San Antonio specifically?

The geography is doing real work here. **San Antonio sat at the southern end of the German Hill Country and the western edge of cotton-belt Texas**; it was the natural market town where Hill-Country Germans came to sell produce and where Anglo-Celtic Texans came to do business with Mexico and the army. By the 1900s it was a city of about 50,000 with a distinctly trilingual character (English, German, Spanish), the largest Catholic diocese in Texas, and a string of military installations (Fort Sam Houston, then Brooks, Kelly, Lackland, Randolph). Both sides of Andrew's family ended up in San Antonio for the same reason most people did: it was the first place big enough to absorb everyone.

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## Inferences About the Communities

Pulling this together, the ancestor locations let us draw some confident inferences about the communities Andrew's family belonged to.

**The Texas-Hill-Country Germans** were a *Vereinsdorf* community in the literal German sense — clubs, choral societies, shooting clubs, volunteer fire departments, and a *Sängerfest* tradition that survived into the 20th century. They were Lutheran or Catholic, they spoke German at home for two generations, they were pro-Union or apolitical during the Civil War, they were thrifty enough to own their land outright (in stark contrast to the heavily mortgaged tenant-farming culture of cotton-belt Texas), and they intermarried so densely that within three generations everyone in Fredericksburg was related to everyone else — which is exactly what we see in Andrew's tree, where the Staudts, Webers, Wüsts, and Stahls of one Hessian village named Frickhofen reconstituted their kinship network on the Pedernales River.

**The Scotch-Irish Presbyterian backcountry community** that produced the Houston, Patton, Hemphill, Young, Simpson, McElroy, and Blythe lines was the dominant cultural matrix of the upland South. It was Presbyterian (with a strong evangelical-Baptist current emerging by the early 1800s), militia-driven, fiercely independent, suspicious of state authority, prone to dueling and feuding, and **the source of the bulk of Confederate enlistment**. The Houstons of Andrew's family literally named their sons after Confederate generals (Cleburne) for two more generations after the war. They were also disproportionately the carriers of westward expansion: every generation moved one frontier west, and Texas was the natural endpoint.

**The Pennsylvania-German Moravians and Reformed** were the smallest stream and the most cohesive in the early phase, but the most thoroughly assimilated by the late 19th century. The Wachovia/Bethania settlement was a closed Moravian theocratic community that broke open after the Revolution; by the third generation the Hausers had become "Hoosers," dropped Moravian distinctiveness, and pushed into Missouri and then Texas just like their Scotch-Irish neighbors.

**The deep-colonial English** were almost background by Andrew's grandparents' generation — names like Young, Stuart, Bryson, Stephens. They had been "American" so long that they had merged into the Scotch-Irish frontier culture that surrounded them, contributing surnames and Anglican-derived church habits but not a distinct community identity by the time the family reached Texas.

The single biggest takeaway is **how thoroughly Andrew's tree is Southern**. With the partial exception of the colonial-Pennsylvania detour for the Hausers and Pattons, *every* immigrant ancestor came in through Philadelphia, Charleston, or Indianola, and *every* immigrant ancestor's descendants ended up in the South — Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, and finally Texas. There is no New England, no New York, no Mid-Atlantic city in the migration paths after the colonial era. Even the German Adelsverein wave, which could have gone to the Midwest like the great post-1848 German immigration, instead went to Texas because that was where the *Verein*'s land grant was. Andrew's family is a textbook case of how distinct European communities became regionally Southern American once they crossed the Atlantic.

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## Open Questions Worth Pursuing

A few threads in the tree are worth chasing further:

1. **The B.F. Young paternity question.** Andrew's own notes on Benjamin Franklin Young (#16) flag the unresolved question of whether his father was James Madison Young (#32 in the main tree) or Thomas Lawrence Young (#A1 in the alternate tree). The Confederate-Cemetery and 1850-Buncombe-census evidence pulls one way; B.F.'s self-reported January-1850 birth date pulls the other. DNA testing of living descendants of both candidate fathers would settle this.
2. **Whether Andrew's Houstons are really cousins of Sam Houston.** The note on "Ready Money" John quotes a 19th-century biography speculating that John's grandfather was a brother of Sam Houston's grandfather, but cites no documentation. Records from the Houstons of Co. Tyrone (Andrew has already saved a useful link) might decide it.
3. **Who the alt-line "Robert Young of Augusta" was related to in the main line.** Both the main A-line and the B-line include immigrant Youngs from Northern Ireland in roughly the same generation. Whether they are the same family seen twice (as some Lamont-clan trees suggest) or two unrelated Ulster Young families would change the shape of the paternal tree significantly.
4. **The Frantzen/Frandsen Danish village.** Erasmus's home parish of Haldum Sogn in Aarhus has good Danish parish registers; tracing the family back further in the Lutheran *kirkebøger* would push the Danish line back to the 1600s.
5. **Whether any of the Anglo-Celtic ancestors enslaved people.** The Houston/Simpson/Moore-line censuses reproduced in the GEDCOM notes (Phillips Co., AR; Lauderdale, AL) show households with the kinds of property values that often correlate with enslavement. The 1850 and 1860 *slave schedules* for these counties would clarify whether any of Andrew's direct ancestors enslaved people. This is a difficult but historically important question for any family with cotton-belt Southern roots.

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*Sources within this report:*
*All facts and quotations not otherwise attributed are drawn from the GEDCOM file `Young Family Tree.ged` (Ancestry.com export, 5 May 2026) and the previously generated `Andrew_Cleburne_Young_Ancestors_10gen.md`. The "History of Schumannsville" is from a Walter F. Rudeloff (1985) document attached as a media record to the GEDCOM. Census abstractions and personal recollections quoted are from individual ancestor NOTE records as preserved by their Ancestry.com submitters.*