IMMIGRANT. Came to America 11 Sep 1731 on the ship Pennsylvania Merchant. He settled soon thereafter in Montgomery County and was an early member of the Old Goshenhoppen Lutheran Church.

Christopher arrived America in 1731 at a time when most captains followed the law and wrote down the names of everyone on board. It would have been so nice had all captain's continued to do that through the years but the common practice evolved too soon to just listing the adult males.

The Beyers listed by the captain were:

• Men over 16: Christopher, Philip and Andreas.

• Women over 16: Margarite and Maria.

• Children under 16: Hendryck, Jerick and Catrina Beyer (apparently listed twice).

But, apparently in researching “American Boyers”, someone checked European church records, and determined the names of twelve children of Christopher and Anna Maria. Quite a number of them died before the family left Germany -- but there appear to be a few discrepancies between the list of the surviving children versus those that were listed by the ship captain.

• Obviously, Christopher himself was one of the men over 16 and I assume Anna Maria was listed as Maria.

• Andrew and Philip were the two oldest sons and were indeed over the age of 16. And Hendrick and George (Jerick) were the two younger sons.

• It is with regard the daughters where the records seem discrepant. No Margarite and no Catrina (let alone two of them) were named in European records. Perhaps their baptisms simply went unrecorded.

• But there was a Hannah Regina born in 1722 and apparently record of her has been found in America -- why was she not listed by the ship captain?

In any event, the child that I am mainly interested in was Andreas, our ancestor, and he was correctly listed -- so the rest is just not my concern.

Christopher was named as the father of Andreas in a biography of Andreas in the early records of the Old Goshenhoppen Church. But mainly what I know about him comes from “American Boyers”, a book that has grown over the decades to cover everyone named Boyer (and variations) in all the different independent family lines of that name. The latest full version is the 7th edition, published in 1984.

The Christopher Boyer line is Chapter 4, as it always has been from the earliest edition of this book. The completeness of the biography of Christopher and his family has evolved from edition to edition as new information has been brought to the editors’ attention.

The latest edition tracks many of Christopher’s descendants including great-grandson George, our ancestor, and that he had a daughter named Mary. It does not acknowledge that she married Henry Yerger and I am bringing that fact to their attention for inclusion in the next edition -- if there ever is one.

American Boyers, in some early editions, said that Christopher’s wife was Anna Maria Fisher but they now say she was “Anna Maria Kuehleisen, born about 1681. She was from Neuses near Dinkelsbuehl, as known from the christening of their son Johann Georg in 1726.”

Obviously someone found the actual church record in Germany stating her correct name.

Anna Maria Bayer was a sponsor at a baptism at New Hanover Lutheran in 1747. I assume this was the mother of Andreas since Andreas had not yet married his second wife, also named Anna Maria, at the time of his 1751 biography.