For my purposes, the story of our Hoshall family (probably originally spelled Hoshal) starts with Jesse Hoshall, our immigrant ancestor of this line, who came to America with his brother Henry not long before the Revolutionary War. Brother Henry initially settled in Pennsylvania, but being a British sympathizer moved to Canada after the War. He supposedly returned to Pennsylvania very late in his life but his sons stayed on in Canada.

Descendants seem to have developed a faint picture of earlier ancestors -- Jesse’s and Henry’s father and grandfather. This picture is definitely what would be called “family tradition” -- which often is part fact and part fiction. Things can get a little muddled as the stories are passed down from one generation to the next.

But there are sufficient vague references to family bibles and other sources of detail and, to date, I have seen no instance of anyone claiming to have debunked it, so I will repeat the sketch here. The story was apparently first told in a book on the family by David Glen Kilmer (a descendant of Henry the Tory), expanded on by Walter Hoshall (also a descendant of Henry the Tory) and then their work summarized by Lola Hoshall Boring (a descendant of our Jesse). Walter wrote:

• ”No doubt the Hoshalls were one of the thousands of families of Palatine Protestant Germans driven out of the Palatinate, that part of Germany lying along the Rhine River, in the early 1700’s by the devastation of wars and the persecutions by the Catholics. Some went to Holland, others to England and still others on to America. We are certain that the Hoshalls settled in Holland during one of these years. Another branch of the family may have settled in England.”

• “Hiram Peterson claims that a bible was brought from Holland written in German script and in it was a complete record of the early Hoshal’s.  According to Hiram, this bible went to old Henry’s daughter Elizabeth, who married George Dean, in 1810.”

•“ An old grandmother of Henry’s and Jesse’s lived in Holland to the age of 107 years of age; and tradition is that she cut and bound a sheaf of wheat on her 100th birthday.  This wheat was threshed and a can of it brought to America, which came down through the family to Henry’s Granddaughter Agnes Navy, who married Thomas James Nevills.  This wheat disappeared in their son Zebulon’s family.  Henry’s great grandson Hiram Peterson, born in 1848 and living in 1930 near St. Davids, Ontario, had the old glasses this old grandmother wore and a towel she spun.”

And Lola added this reference to a different family bible:

• “There is a family bible which belonged to Thomas Hoshall Sr. of White Hall, Maryland, with an inscription: Isaac Hoshal, whose father was Jesse, whose father was Henry, whose father came from Germany.”

I actually found what appears to be a true copy of exactly that excerpt from Isaac’s bible at the Maryland Historical Society. It is specific as to the name of Jesse’s father -- but not his grandfather -- and is specific as to the German origins of the family but leaves out any mention of Holland. The phrase “came from Germany”, though, is quite curious -- came to where? I’m sure it was not to America, so is to Holland implied?

The German ancestors of my Grandpa Mertz came to America between 1730-1755 (or so) and the route they took brought them down the Rhine to Holland (the Rhine flows North, remember) where they boarded a ship first to England and then on to America. The trip took many months to complete, but there is no evidence of any ancestral family of his living in Holland for a period of years or even generations.

So perhaps the Hoshalls were among the advance guard of Palatinate migration (well before 1730) and in those years passage to America from Holland was not as routine as it would later become, so they maybe did settle in Holland, and then a subsequent generation moved on. It’s possible the Hoshalls left Germany earlier than any of my grandfather’s German ancestors but arrived America quite a bit later.

Now about Jesse’s grandfather: Walter Hoshall says “Henry” was born in Germany about 1650 and died in Holland around 1710. His wife was the “grandmother” who lived to age 107. Walter does not seem bothered by the conflicting information he provides saying Henry’s son Henry was born about 1720. Other Canadian researchers solve that problem by saying Henry Sr. lived to 1730, but they don’t seem bothered by the fact that in that case Henry (and his wife too) were quite old (70-ish) when Henry Jr. was born.

Bottom line. Obviously, Jesse Hoshall had a grandfather who was German. But anything else anyone says about that man -- his name, the decades he lived, and whether he ever took his family and moved to Holland -- are not proven. On the other hand, nothing I’ve found directly contradicts the family tradition either. Someday, perhaps we’ll learn more.