Page News & Courier
Heritage and Heraldry
Origins of the Broyles Family of Page County
Article of October 19, 2000
The patriarch immigrant, Johannes Breyhel, was christened the son of
Conrad and Margaretha Schelling Breyhel on May 1, 1679 in Dusslingen,
Wuerttemberg (just south of Tuebingen in present day Germany). Fifty
years later, Breyhel was living 50 miles to the south in Oetisheim, where
on November 6, 1703, he married Ursula Ruop, the daughter of a local
gravedigger. Fourteen years later, Johannes, his wife, and several
children joined approximately twenty other families aboard the ship Scott in
immigration from the German Palatinate. Like an earlier group, this
second group of German colonists was sponsored by Virginia Governor
Alexander Spotswood. In return for payment of passage, the German families
were to be indentured to the governor for seven years and were joined
together with the twelve other German families that were settled in 1714
at what became known as Germanna in Orange, then a part of Essex,
County.
In 1724, the Rev. Hugh Jones published a description of the Germanna
colony in his Present State of Virginia. In it he stated: "Beyond
Governor Spotswood's furnace above the Falls of the Rappahannock River,
within view of the vast mountains, he has founded a town, called Germanna
from the Germans sent over by Queen Anne, who are now removed up
further. He has servants and workmen at most handicraft trades, and he is
building a church, courthouse, and dwelling house for himself; and with
his servants and negroes he has cleared plantations about it, proposing
great encouragement for people to come and settle in that uninhabited
part of the world, lately divided into a county, that is Spotsylvania."
The Breyhel family, along with most of the colonists of 1717 and yet a
third group of colonist of 1719, remained at Germanna until about 1727.
For the three years preceding, many families had been "proving" their
importations in the Spotsylvania County Court "in order to take up lands
under the Head-right Act." Relocating to the Robertson River section of
Madison County. It was while also there that the German immigrants
founded the Hebron Lutheran Church. It was also at this time that there
was a change in the Breyhel name. Johannes/John's son Jacob (Hans Jacob)
became the progenitor of the BROYLES family, and son Conrad was
progenitor of the BRILES family. It was from Hans that the Page Valley
Broyles family descended.
Hans Jacob had been born in Germany in 1705 and had thus been one of
the few fortunate children to survive to adulthood. About 1727, Hans
married Maria Catherine Fleischmann. One of their sons, Zacharias (named
for Maria's Germanna immigrant father) married Delilah Clore in the
early 1760s. Like Zachariah, Delilah was also a child of Germanna
children (Peter Clore and Barbara Yaeger). In the succeeding generations, the
Broyles family remained in the Madison-Culpeper County area and by the
middle 1800s had begun to marry into English surname families. As
early as the 1840s, branches of the Broyles family began entering Page
County from Madison County. The earliest marriage of a Broyles in the
county is shown in 1848. However, succeeding generations from Madison
entered Page in the third quarter of the 1800s to marry and reside here.
There is a great website for those interested in the Broyles family
lines - http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~george/index.html#Index and
several fantastic publications available about the settlers of old Germanna
from the Memorial Foundation of the Germanna Colonies in Virginia, Inc.
Their address is P.O. Box 693, Culpeper, Virginia 22701-0693.
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