MAHWAH, NJ – Poet patriot Joyce Kilmer’s ties to Mahwah stretch far deeper into Mahwah’s past than the five years he lived here.
Records unearthed by award-winning genealogist Hank Z. Jones Jr., and historical accounts of Kilmer’s family provide evidence that Kilmer’s ancestors were Palatine emigrants from Germany who arrived in New York during the exodus of 1710 with thousands of other Palatines -- including some who later settled in the Mahwah area.
A comprehensive report on Kilmer’s ancestral heritage is contained in the monthly newsletter of the Joyce Kilmer Society of Mahwah.
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The Palatines mostly farmed the land and tended to vineyards flanking the Rhine River in southwestern Germany. Because of fears of continuing invasions by France’s Louis XIV, oppressive taxes by the counts ruling their land and a brutal winter, they left for England and then sailed to America. Several thousand were sent to upstate New York to produce stores (resin, tar and pitch) for the English Navy in an agreement to pay for their voyage and subsistence costs.
The work camp venture in what is now Germantown, NY, failed and the Palatines dispersed – some staying in the area, others traveling to other states and some settling in the “Ramapo tract” in the Mahwah area.
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Jones, author of the acclaimed book, “The Palatines of New York,” found subsistence records, which identiifed the head of the first generation of Kilmers in the Hudson Valley as Georg Kuhlmann/Kilmer (spelling variations in German and English).
Using the first three generations of Kulmann/Kilmer and historical accounts in “The Kilmer Family in America,” written by Joyce Kilmer’s uncle, the Rev. Charles H. Kilmer, the paternal linkage was made of Joyce Kilmer to Kulmann/Kilmer and the other Palatines who sailed to America on the same fleet of 11 ships in 1710.
Kulmann/Kilmer, in some cases, worked side by side with other Palatines who eventually came to the Mahwah area – Peter Wannemacher/Wanamaker and Conrad Meissinger/Messinger.
A historical marker on the site of the “Old Lutheran Cemetery,” on Moffatt Road in Mahwah serves as a lasting memorial to 11 German Palatine families that settled in the Mahwah area in 1713 and a built a church that evolved into the Ramapo Reformed Church that stands nearby.
The marker tells of the family names on the burial stones – names including Messenger and Wanamaker, names of descendants of those who left Germany in the Exodus of 1710.
Before the Kilmer linkage could be made, however, a case of mistaken identity had to be solved.
Jones, a fellow of the American Society of Genealogists, reported that the first Kilmer in the Hudson Valley was thought to be “Philipp Kilmer.” That was inaccurate, he said. The real “first” was George Kuhlmann/Kilmer.
The case of mistaken identify came about, he said, through a misreading of the emigrant Philip Helmer’s name found on one of the work camp records of 1710/11 and turning it into “Philipp Kilmer.”
The mistake confused latter Kilmer family members so they hedged on the issue of the “first” Kilmer, but otherwise used realiable information for the succeeeding Kilmer ancestors.
Here is the Kilmer genealogy tree, as determined by the combined evidence found by Jones and the accounts of the Kilmer family:
Kulhlmann/Kilmer’s name first appeared on the work camp lists on July 4, 1710. His wife was called Anna or Eva Margaretha.
His eldest son, Georg, married Anna Margareth Falckenberger on April 20, 1738.
The son of Georg, the junior, was Wilhelm Kilmer, a properous farmer and highly-esteemed community member. He was listed in the Germantown Reformed Church books. He married Gertraud Pulver on Oct. 27, 1767.
Peter Kilmer, Wilhelm’s son, was born in Germantown, and pioneered local ore mining.
Peter’s son, Charles Kilmer (not the reverend), spent his boyhood in what was known as “the Kilmer place, Livingston Manor (the name before Germantown and site of one of the Palatine work camps). He was an iron ore minor and a Methodist lay preacher who acquired a deep knowledge of the Scriptures and ancient and modern history.
Charles’ son, Frederick Barnett Kilmer, was a farm boy in upstate New York who worked at odd jobs to finance his schooling and rose to become a prominent pharmacist and scientific director of Johnson & Johnson Pharamceuticals in New Brunswick, NJ where he invented the famous “Johnson’s Baby Powder.”
Frederick’s son, Joyce Kilmer, became a world-renowned poet with “Trees,” written in his Mahwah house on February 2, 1913. He established a stellar career as a journalist at The New York Times during his five years in Mahwah where he penned many of his most-beloved poems and helped to raise with his wife, Aline, four of their five children, and later was the most distinguihsed American to die in World War I. Born an Episcopalian, he and his wife converted to Catholicism when their youngest daughter was diagnosed with polio.
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