Anna Maria’s Impossible Choice

Imagine you are four months pregnant. You've buried two of your babies in the German soil of the Palatinate, and now you are boarding a wooden ship to cross an ocean you've never seen, heading to a country you've only dreamed of. You and your husband have one surviving son and a thousand miles of salt water ahead of you. This was the reality for my six times great-grandmother, Anna Maria. In 1749, she wasn't looking for a political revolution. She was looking for a foothold. She was looking for a promise of a place with names like Silver Fancy and Poplar Fields in the wild red-earthed frontier of Maryland. We usually tell the story of the American Revolution as an English family feud. But for the thousands of German immigrants like the Niccums, the king in London wasn't their father. He was just the latest in a 6,000-year line of tyrants that they were determined to outrun. Maryland would prove a challenge to Anna Maria, but in the Toms Creek 100, she would hold the line so her children could inherit the West and develop a new kind of American identity. Stories That Live in Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present, and future. I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist. Coming down to the upcoming celebration of America's 250th birthday, you'll meet families from each state whose stories are woven into the very fabric of America. Tales of immigration, migration, courage, and community that remind us that when we tell our stories, we strengthen the bonds that connect us. So join me for season two as we discover from sea to shining sea the stories that live in us. To understand why the Niccums left, we have to look at the world that they lived in. It was a place where the map was cut up into hundreds of tiny principalities, each ruled by a different strong man. In my research, I found a reflection on this era that puts it perfectly. Since the beginning of time, the affairs of men have gravitated toward forceful leaders, the pharaohs, the Caesars, and eventually the King Georges. For 6,000 years, history was just a circle, from priest to king, from king to dictator, and back again. And for 6,000 years, the people at the bottom, people like Johann Nicol Niccum, struggled to survive. In 1749, the Rhineland Palatinate was beautiful, but it was exhausted. It was a land of changing princes. If a new ruler took over your village, he could demand that you change your religion, or he could install a tax station every 10 miles along the river if he wanted. Trying to build a life when the rules change every time a new man wears the crown has got to be exhausting and possibly dangerous. But for my six times great-grandparents, Peter and Anna Maria, the princes weren't the only ones who were taking things from them. The land itself had turned harsh. It was a really beautiful place, but there was a winter so cold that birds reportedly froze in mid-air, and all the crops in the fields and vineyards were wiped out. And then there were the graves. Before they ever stepped foot on a ship, Anna Maria and Peter had already said goodbye to at least two of their children, Sarah and Elizabetha, buried in the soil of Erzweiler. When your rulers are tyrants and your crops are failing, and the ground holds more of your children than there are seated around the dinner table, you start to listen to the whispers coming from across the ocean. They started hearing names that sounded like a dream. Names like the Monocacy, poplar fields, and silver fancy. To a family that had been squeezed for generations, a place called Maryland, and the idea of vacant land probably sounded magical. Not because the soil was magic, but because the atmosphere was free. So in the spring of 1749, three generations of Niccums, 65-year-old Nickel Niccum and his wife, Katerina, their two sons, Peter and Nickel Jr., with their wives and six children ranging in ages from 15 years down to 15 months, turned their backs on the Rhineland. They weren't just seeking a new farm. They were betting their entire lives that they could finally break a 6,000-year cycle of hunger and fear. But to get to that silver fancy in Maryland, they first had to survive the Elliot. Leaving Erzweiler was the first step, but it was a long way from the finish line. To get to the ocean, the Niccums had to float north up the Rhine River. Today, that's a scenic tourist cruise that takes six or seven days with lovely stops along the way. But in 1749, it was a bureaucratic nightmare. The river was choked with nearly 40 different custom houses. And at every single one, they had to stop. And at every single one, they had to pay a different fee to a different prince or local lord. And it took them six weeks just to reach the North Sea. Then they had to wait in Rotterdam while they secured passage to America. They hadn't even seen the Atlantic Ocean yet, and much of their life savings was already gone. Then came the ship, the Elliot. It wasn't a passenger liner. It was a wooden shell designed for cargo, now packed with hundreds of people. Now I want you to look at this through Anna Maria's eyes. She is first five, then six, then seven months pregnant on this trip. She's living in a space no bigger than a kitchen table with her husband Peter and their nine-year-old son Michael. Next to them is Peter's brother and his wife with five more children. Her in-laws on the other side of her, at a time when 65 years old was considered old. The water in the barrels on the ship starts to turn slimy and black. The food is limited to salt beef and hard bread. And when the storms hit, they're locked below deck in the dark, tossed by waves that make the giant timbers of the ship groan. And she's pregnant. But they survived. After months at sea, on August 24, 1749, the Elliot dropped anchor in Philadelphia. The men were rowed ashore to a big brick building called the Courthouse. There, my seven times great-grandfather, Johann Nicol Niccum, and his sons, Peter and Nickel Jr., stood before the English authorities. They couldn't speak the language. Peter and Nicol Jr. couldn't even sign their own names. The clerks certainly couldn't spell Niccum. They were likely exhausted, their legs still shaking from months at sea. Peter and Nickel Jr. just made their marks. Doing this, they swore an oath of allegiance to an English king they had never met. They were officially off the ship, but they still weren't home because the promise wasn't the city of Philadelphia. The promise was the silver fancy, still 140 miles away down a rough wilderness track called the Monocacy Trail. And they had to get there fast because Anna Maria was now nine months pregnant. And her American story was about to begin with the scream of childbirth, the miracle of childbirth. They bought a wagon loaded up with 12 people, three generations of their family and belongings, and turned onto the Monocasy Trail. This wasn't a road, it was a rough limestone, heavy wilderness track that followed the base of the mountains. It was the gateway to the west. And in late summer 1749, it was muggy and a bone-jarring ride. On September 4th, Anna Maria gave birth to a son named George. Think about that timeline for just a minute. It's 150 miles from the docks of Philadelphia to the banks of Tom's Creek in western Maryland, where they landed. In 1749, that journey took at least a week, maybe more. We don't know the exact timeline math. When George took his first breath, Anna Maria was either at a makeshift camp along the side of the road, or she had just arrived at the place they would call home. There was no doctors, there were no midwives from the old village. There was just humidity in Maryland, the sounds of a forest that was still probably an intimidating wilderness, and the red earth that would soon become their lifeblood. She was likely aided by her sister-in-law and her mother-in-law. In the old world, George would have been born a subject of a Germanic prince. But because Anna Maria held on through that ocean crossing, because she endured those final miles on that road, George was born into a different atmosphere. He didn't know the palatinate. He didn't have the memory of the cycle of tyrants. His first breath was the air of the Maryland frontier. His first drink was the mountain water that the local tribes believed had magical healing powers. For Peter and Anna Maria, George was the proof that the gamble had paid off. They had found their foothold. But as Anna Maria held her newborn son, the state of Maryland was about to change from a silent forest into a battlefield. They sat right on the edge of a war. The Niccums settled in the Toms Creek Hundred. In Maryland, a hundred was a community of about a hundred families. And this one was as isolated as it got. It was a day's ride on horseback from any real help in the nearest town, Fredericktown. Just a few dozen miles away, a 22-year-old militia officer named George Washington was making the mistakes that would spark the French and Indian War. Suddenly, the silent frontier was not so silent. By 1754, the Toms Indians who had lived here were moving out, replaced by French-backed raiding parties. Soon, Indian raiding parties were moving through the woods. Then, news reached the Niccums that Monocacy Village had been burned to the ground. Many of their neighbors began to flee back to the safety of the coastal cities. Wealthy land barons in the area were building forts. But the people of Tom's Creek, the record tells us they were defenseless. There was no fort there, no soldiers. Anna Maria was now a mother to more children. Michael and George and their young siblings were being raised in a house that didn't have stone walls. This family, their extended family, their small community, was protected only by their own resolve. Maryland didn't offer them a fort, but it gave them a choice: stay and become part of the land, or flee and remain a refugee. The Niccums chose to stay and became part of the land. By the 1760s, the defenseless frontier was starting to feel like home. The forests were becoming fields of wheat, reportedly the best in the colonies. But as the threat of the French faded, a new tension started to rise in the taverns and the mills of Tom's Creek. We often talk about the American Revolution as if it's a fight between England and her colonies, this family feud across the Atlantic Ocean. But that's not how it felt here. For Michael and George Niccum, the boy who survived the ship and the boy born on the road, the king in London was just a name. They didn't feel like English children. They weren't. They were Marylanders. When the Stamp Act hit and wagons were being seized, the people of Tom's Creek didn't just see attacks, they saw another strong man starting to restart that 6,000-year cycle of control. When the local militia formed the Gamecock Company with their plum feathers, they were fighting for the land that their mother had sacrificed everything to reach. But Anna Maria, she wouldn't live to see the plum feathers or the birth of the new nation. In 1767, at the age of 47, Anna Maria Sangers Niccum died. After nearly a dozen children and 18 years of holding the line on the Maryland frontier, her journey ended like so many women before her and since in childbirth. She's buried in Tom's Creek Cemetery, just east of what is now Emmettsburg, Maryland. The soil there is this distinct red. The locals call it Terra Ruba, red earth. It's poetic, really. After crossing the black waters of the Atlantic to find a new life, she became a permanent part of the Maryland Earth. She was the mother of the foothold this family would have in the New World. While some of the Niccums stayed in Frederick County and still are there today, Michael, my five times great-grandfather, left with his wife and children. Maryland had done its job. It had provided the nursery and the food and the freedom for their family to grow strong. They weathered and won the American Revolution. Then in the early 1800s, with War Service land grants in hand, they headed west, moving into Ohio and Indiana and beyond. But they carried that red earth with them in their names and in their stories. Maryland isn't just another state on the map for my family. For this branch of my family, it is the place that gave us our start. It is the place where we stopped being weary German subjects of yet another ruler and started being Americans. And so I've been thinking about Anna Maria. I think about what it took to leave the land of her ancestors. I think about that 10-day window between the wooden ship arriving in Philadelphia and the wilderness birth of her son George. I think about her standing her ground in the face of commotion and war. I think of her raising those children in the middle of all of that. I've also been wishing I knew more of her story. I don't know what she looked like. I don't know if she wanted to leave Germany or not. Did she resist? Was she terrified? Was she resolute? Was she both? I don't know what she whispered to that baby born on that road, or if she knew she was dying when she gave birth to her last child. But I do know I wouldn't be here without her. History remembers the men who signed their names. It often forgets the women who made it all possible. Somewhere in your family tree, there is a woman like Anna Maria. She signed nothing. She appears in very few official records. But you would not exist without her. Go find her and say her name out loud. Studio sponsored by Ancestry.