The Five Jacob Seebers

Who was Jacob W. Seeber?

No doubt the people who lived in the Mohawk Valley prior to the Revolutionary War had as much difficulty differentiating among the five Jacob Seebers as we do today. The temptation must have been strong to use nicknames or other special identifiers. Probably that's the reason that records about one of the Jacob Seebers usually use the middle initial "W" to refer to him.

Jacob W. Seeber is one of the best-known early members of the family, largely because of his military service in the Revolutionary War. In August 1775 he was appointed captain of the 4th Company of the First (Canajoharie) Regiment of Tryon County militia, and after March 1776 he served as captain of Colonel Cornelius D. Wynkoop's 4th New York Company of the Continental army. Seeber's company of Continentals was discharged in November 1776, and there is no record that he subsequently was appointed or served as an officer in the militia or Continental army. However, he fought in the Battle of Oriskany, perhaps as a volunteer, and died within a few days of wounds suffered in the battle. The surviving military records about him, including pension applications by soldiers who served under him, usually refer to him using the middle initial. As was customary at the time, he undoubtedly used the "W" to indicate that his father's given name began with that letter. Of the five Jacob Seebers identified above, only Jacobs #2 and #4, both sons of Wilhelms, would meet that criterion.

In the past, most Seeber researchers and descendants assumed that Jacob #4 was Captain Jacob W. Seeber. In large part, that was because Jacob #4, as the son of Johann Wilhelm Seeber (1721-1777), was a "known quantity" while little or nothing was known about the other Jacob Seebers living in the area at the time. When looked at carefully, the information now available suggests strongly that Jacob #2, not Jacob #4, was the officer known as Captain Jacob W. Seeber:

• Jacob #4 would have been extraordinarily young -- only 24 -- to be appointed to the high rank of captain in the militia in August 1775. Most of the other captains who served in the 1st (Canajoharie) regiment of Tryon County militia were born in the 1730s, a couple in the early 1740s. Jacob #4, born in 1751, would have been a comparative youngster in their midst.

• If Jacob #4 was Jacob W. Seeber, he would have held a higher rank than all of his uncles and all of his brothers, including his older brothers William and Conrad. The only family member with a higher rank was Johann Wilhelm Seeber, the father of Jacob #4, who was a major and later a lieutenant colonel in the militia. Age and experience matter within families, and in the military, and it improbable that Jacob #4 would have been selected for a higher rank than his uncles and older brothers.

• Jacob #2 was an appropriate age to command troops as a captain of the militia and Continental army. He would have been 38 when appointed captain of the militia, and 39 when he was captain of the Continental troops. This is consistent with the age of other captains who served in his regiment of the Tryon County militia.

• Henry Seeber (1741-1845) told family members, in a statement recorded on the Henry Seeber (1741-1845) page of this website, that Captain Jacob W. Seeber was his brother. This would rule out Jacob #4 as a possibility (he and Henry were uncle and nephew) and point strongly to Jacob #2 (he and Henry were brothers).

For all of the above reasons, I believe that Jacob W. Seeber was Jacob #2, rather than Jacob #4 as usually claimed.

Who was Jacobus Seeber?

Another of the Jacob Seebers was consistently known by the first name "Jacobus" and its short form "Cobus." The following records have been found using those names:

• In 1778 Cobus Seeber was a sponsor of the baptism of Willem (Wilhelm), son of Jacob Seeber and his wife Anna Elisabetha Dygert. The baptism was recorded in the Caughnawaga (Fonda) Reformed church.

• On 20 July 1784, Jacobus Seeber married Maria Barbara Keller. We know this from the 1791 death record of Maria Barbara in the Fort Plain Reformed Church. There is a remarkable amount of detail in this record. It states that her maiden name was Keller, she was born 1 March 1766, she married Jacobus Seeber 20 July 1784, she died 3 April 1791, she was buried 5 April 1791, and she was survived by three children.

• In September 1784 Jacobus Seber (sic) was issued two certificates for his service as a corporal in Captain Renier Van Everen's (7th) company of Colonel Samuel Clyde's (1st) regiment of Tryon County militia. The period of service was not indicated in the record. Next to him in the list, with a different certificate number, was Jacob Seeber, also a corporal.

• In the years 1799 through 1802, Jacobus Seeber appeared on tax lists of property owners in the Town of Manheim in Montgomery County, New York. He was the owner of real property valued at $246 to $260, and personal property valued up to $18.

Viewing these records as a group makes a couple of things clear. First, Jacobus must have been one of the younger Jacobs identified above, since he wasn't married until 1784 and he was still living in 1802. Secondly, he was closely associated with another Jacob Seeber, probably a cousin of similar age, since he served as a sponsor of the latter's child and they held identical ranks in the same military unit.

In my opinion, Jacobus was most likely Jacob #5, for the following reasons:

• Jacob #1 was probably deceased by 1784, and if still living would have been unusually old to be marrying a young bride. Plus, he was almost certainly deceased by 1802, at which time he would have been 80 years old.

• If Jacob #2 was Captain Jacob W. Seeber, as discussed above, then he died in 1777 following the Battle of Oriskany.

• Jacobs #3 and #4 were both rather old to be marrying a girl of 18 in 1784; Jacob #3 would have been in his late 30s or early 40s, and Jacob #4 would have been 33.

• Jacob #5 was the only one of the five Jacobs who was anywhere near the age of Maria Barbara Keller. She was 18 when she married in 1784; he would have been 24.

Was James Seeber one of the Jacobs identified above?

Most lists of Seeber family members who died during or after the Battle of Oriskany include James Seeber. He is a somewhat mysterious figure because there are no church records of that period referring to James Seeber, and it is unclear how he was related to other family members. Some accounts indicate that he was a son of Johann Wilhelm Seeber (1721-1777), others that he was his brother.

In English James is a variant of the name Jacob, raising the possibility that James was the same person as one of the five Jacobs identified above. However, if James was the brother of Henry, Severinus, Jacob W. and Wilhelm, as claimed in the statement of Henry Seeber discussed elsewhere on this website, then he could not have been one of the five Jacobs. This is what I have assumed in my Ancestry.com member tree, but it is a question that requires more research and analysis.

The Jacob Seeber wives

Identifying the wives of these five Jacob Seebers is almost as vexing as determining how they are related to each other. There are many gaps in the church records in the Mohawk Valley before and during the Revolutionary War, and marriage records that still exist usually don't mention the parents of the bride and groom. This makes it very difficult to differentiate among multiple members of the same family with the same name living during the same time period, as is the case with our Jacob Seebers.

Nevertheless, we can make some conclusions based on available records.

• Jacob #1, the oldest of the five, was married earlier than the others. If we assume that his son, the sponsor, was at least fourteen years old at the time of the 1760 baptism, and that he and his wife were already married when the son was born, then he would have been married before 1746. His wife is not named in the baptism record, and there are no other known records that give her name. They probably married in America because there is no record of Jacob #1 having married in Bischwiller before he emigrated.

• Jacob #2, father of the baptized child, was married before 1760 when his son was born. His wife's name was Maria Esther, according to the baptismal record; unfortunately, her maiden name is not given. She may also have been born in Bischwiller, or to a family from Bischwiller, because Maria Esther is a very common name for girls and women in that town although it is quite rare elsewhere. There is no record in the Mohawk Valley churches of other children born to Jacob #2 and Maria Esther. Both of them were still alive and married to each other in January 1766 when they served as baptismal sponsors of Jacobus Schaeffer in the Stone Arabia Reformed Church.

• A Jacob Seeber married Elisabetha Barbara Laux on 18 March 1766, as recorded in the Stone Arabia Reformed Church. The obvious candidate for the groom is Jacob #3. In 1766 Jacob #1 and Jacob #2 were already married to other women. Jacob #4 and Jacob #5 were too young, only fourteen and five respectively at the time of the marriage. (Note that many researchers and descendants in the past assumed that Jacob #4 married Elisabetha Barbara Laux, for the same reason that they assumed that Jacob #4 was Captain Jacob W. Seeber -- namely, that Jacob #4 was a "known quantity" while the other Jacob Seebers were largely unknown.)

• Another Jacob Seeber married Anna Elisabetha Dygert before 1778. There is no record of their marriage in the Mohawk Valley church records, but they were already married when their son Willem (Wilhelm) was born on 22 January 1778 and baptized in the Caughnawaga (Fonda) Reformed Church. Anna Elisabetha was a widow; her first husband, Johann Dietrich Wohleben, had been killed in the Battle of Oriskany. Some researchers have speculated that this Jacob Seeber was a son or grandson of Martin Seibert, the Palatine, but I think he was probably from the Seeber family. The most likely candidate is Jacob #4, the son of Johann Wilhelm Seeber (1721-1777) and his first wife, who was about the same age as Anna Elisabetha. We can eliminate Jacobs #1, 2 and 3 because they were deceased or had married other women, and Jacob #5 because he was rather young to be married before 1778, and significantly younger than Anna Elisabetha. (Jacob #4 has been ruled out in the past because it was assumed he was the Captain Jacob W. Seeber who died after the Battle of Oriskany; as we have seen, it is very unlikely that he was the captain).

• Finally, a Jacob Seeber, referred to as "Jacobus," married Maria Barbara Keller in 1784. There is no record of their marriage, but when Maria Barbara died in 1791, her burial record in the Fort Plain Reformed Church mentioned that she had married Jacobus Seeber in 1784. Of the five Jacob Seebers we have identified, Jacob #5 (the child baptized in 1760) is the most likely to have been the groom. All of the other Jacobs were married to other women, or deceased, and he was about the same age as Maria Barbara.

Jacob Seebers in the Military

One of the Jacob Seebers served in the French and Indian War, as a sergeant in Capt. Jacob Klock's company of Albany County militia. This could have been Jacob #1 or Jacob #2; the record does not provide enough information to determine which of them was involved.

It seems likely that all of the Jacob Seebers, with the possible exception of Jacob #1, fought on the American side during the Revolutionary War. Some of the surviving records refer to "Jacob W. Seeber" or "Jacobus Seeber" and we can be fairly certain that they refer to Jacob #2 and Jacob #5, respectively, as discussed above. However, the remaining records are not sufficiently detailed to identify the specific Jacob to which they refer.

Here's a summary of the military records which have been found. Sources are listed below the table. Abbreviations used in the table are Co. = Company, Reg. = Regiment, pr. = probably, v. = volume, p. = page.

Sources:

BERRY = A. J. Berry, "Fort Plain & Fort Plank: the Two Fort Plain Forts, in the Words of Those Who Served" (2013), available online at the website of the Fort Plain Museum and Historical Park, Fort Plain, NY.

NYITR = New York in the Revolution as Colony and State (2 volumes)(Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Co., 1904)

TARSH = Third Annual Report of the State Historian of the State of New York (New York: Wynkoop Hallenbeck Crawford Co., 1898).

WATT = Gavin K. Watt & James F. Morrison, The British Campaign of 1777, Volume One: the St. Leger Expedition, 2^nd edition (Milton, Ontario, Canada: Global Heritage Press, 2003)

F3 = Fold3.com image number