Myth #2: He was the son of Johann Martin Seibert, the Palatine

    Several earlier researchers, including Frederick Phillips and Margaret Bohart, have suggested that Johann Wilhelm Seeber (1721-1777) may have been the son of Johann Martin Seibert, who came to America with his family during the Palatine emigration of 1709-10.  The St. Catharines list of Palatines, compiled in London on 6 May 1709, indicates that Seibert was born about 1674 and came to the Hudson River settlements with his wife and two children, a daughter born about 1705 and a son born about 1707.  Seibert and his family moved to Schoharie County, New York by 1714, and he and his wife had a third child there -- Georg Adam, born 14 December 1715 and baptized 24 January 1716.  Marte Server (sic) and Johan Jacob Server, presumed to be Seibert and his older son, were naturalized on 17 January 1715/1716 in Albany.1

      There are several significant problems with the suggestion that Seibert was the father of Johann Wilhelm Seeber:

• • Almost all written accounts of Johann Wilhelm, by historians and descendants, indicate that he was born in Europe, not America.

  • If Johann Wilhelm had been a son of Seibert, his birth and baptism should have been recorded somewhere, as was the birth and baptism of Georg Adam in 1715/1716.

  • Johann Wilhelm named his first son William, and did not name any of his sons Martin. This suggests, as discussed elsewhere on this website, that he was the son of Johann Wilhelm Seeber (1695-), not Martin Seibert.

  • Seibert would have been about 47 years old when Johann Wilhelm was born.  If Seibert's wife was his same age, or only slightly younger, she would have been rather old to have a child in 1721.

  • If Johann Wilhelm had been born in America, there would have been no need for him to be naturalized -- in which case, who was the William Seeber naturalized in 1761?

  • Seibert's name is usually spelled with a "t" at the end.  This is certainly not conclusive, given the casual approach to the spelling of names in the 1700s, but it is important -- especially because records about the Montgomery County Seeber family rarely have a "t" at the end of the name.

  • A Y-chromosome study in 2008 suggested that the two families -- Seibert and Seeber -- are not related.  See the DNA Testing page of this website.

    Given these problems, and the considerable evidence that Johann Wilhelm was born in Bischwiller, it is appropriate to characterize as "myth" the suggestion that he was the son of Johann Martin Seibert.

1Good summaries of the records available about the Martin Seibert family can be found in Margaret Bohart's research notes, on file at the Montgomery County Department of History and Archives in Fonda, New York, and in Henry Z (Hank) Jones' book, The Palatine Families of New York (Universal City, California: H. Z. Jones, 1985), pages 958-9.