A Leinbach/Lineback/Linebaugh Genealogy
 
   
   Johannes Leinbach (1712-1766) house in Wachovia.
 
  The Road to Wachovia
 
The Immigrants

Johann Heinrich Leimbach, born about 1649, grew up in central Germany northeast of present-day Frankfurt-am-Main, Hessen, Germany. By the time of his marriage to Barbara Lerch in 1672, he had moved to the town of Langenselbold located in a valley along the Kinzig River, a tributary of the Main, just east of Frankfurt. There Heinrich practiced his linenweaving trade and Barbara gave birth to the first five of their six children. But by 1689 Heinrich had moved his family to the nearby hamlet of Hochstadt and had embarked on a new career as a schoolteacher. Following his death in 1716, the patriarch of the Leinbach immigrants to America was buried in nearby in Oberdorfelden.

Johannes Leinbach, the eldest son of Johann Heinrich and Barbara, also became a schoolteacher in Hochstadt. In 1700, Johannes married Anna Elizabeth Kleiss. Three years later the first of their seven children was born. Twenty-three years later, soon after the birth of their last child, Johannes and Elizabeth decided to leave Hochstadt for America. And, so it was that in 1723 a sailing ship brought Johannes Leinbach, his wife Anna Elizabeth, and their five surviving children to begin a new life in the Oley Valley on the far outskirts of Philadelphia.



Overlooking the Leinbach homestead in the Oley Valley of Pennsylvania.

What could have possessed a man of forty-nine to pack up Frau und Kinder and start over in a strange land an ocean away? Pennsylvania, founded in 1681 by William Penn for the Quakers, had quickly become a haven to many other European Protestants. But whether it was the promise of fertile land, or the mild climate, or religious tolerance that brought the organ-playing schoolmaster to America is lost in time. Once here, Johannes wasted little time in becoming established in Penn's colony of predominantly Scottish-Irish and German immigrants. By 1734 he and his family were farming 250 acres of land in present day Berks County. In a few more years the growing family had spread to other areas outside Pennsylvania. And in 1759 the first Leinbach reached North Carolina.

Leinbach homestead in the Oley Valley.

 

Prologue The Road To Wachovia The Moravians
The German-American Collection