German Mercenary Expatriates in the U.S. & Canada Following the American Revolution

This volume on German mercenaries combines three separate booklets in CliffordNeal Smith's German-American Genealogical Research Monograph Series. The contents of this consolidated volume concern mercenaries from the dutchies or principalities of Brunswick Ansbach and Bayreuth and Hessen-Hanau based on sources in German archives. For example Mr. Smith found the names of over 1700 soldiers who failed to return to Brunswick in 1783 in an article by Hans Helmut Rimpau in the obscure periodical Archiv fuer Sippenforschung. Similarly Mr. Smith discovered the professional soldiers who left from Ansbach and Bayreuth in the equally rare doctoral dissertation by Dr. Erhard Staedtler entitled Die Ansbach-Bayreuther Truppen in Amerikanischen Unabhaengigkeitskrieg 1777-1783. The Brunswick forces it should be noted served mainly in Canada and northern New York where they are likely to be found residing in 1790--unless they became prisoners of war. The Ansbach and Bayreuth contingents were attached directly to the British army commanded by generals Howe and Clinton and together served in nearly every operation of the war. Their counterparts from Hessen-Hanau fought in New York were captured during the Saratoga campaign and were force-marched to Charlottesville Virginia. While the contents of the component booklets in this volume vary from one another in the majority of cases researchers can expect to fi nd the mercenary's name rank age birthplace unit and date and place of desertion. The volume identifies 7000 German soldiers in all the majority of whom chose to cast their lot with the New World.