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Benjamin
Custard was here, at The Forks of The Ohio, in what is now called
Pittsburgh, by 1775. To
tell the story of the Custard family is to tell the story of the
town of Jefferson, Colonial America, and American history.
Let's go back three generations before Benjamin Custard.
His great-grandparents, Paulus Kusters (1644 - 1708) and
Gertrud Doors Kusters, were part of a wave of German emigration to
America in the late 1600's and early 1700's.
Germany had been ransacked and pillaged from centuries of
warfare. Germans consequently were attracted to Pennsylvania by the
promise of religious freedom in William Penn's colony.
Paulus and Gertrud came from the town of Kaldenkirchen in
the Rhineland. The
exact date of their arrival in America is not known.
They were still in Germany, present at the baptism of their
twin granddaughters Gertruet and Agnes, as late as 1696, and were
in America by 1700. They
settled in Germantown, outside Philadelphia.
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The
family prospered here. They
had between 8 and 11 children.
But here begins the problem.
The family farm got smaller and smaller as it got divided
up in each generation. Also, people didn't practice soil conservation until the
1800's. After a
couple generations, everyone was down to a long narrow strip of
land, and soil that was worn out.
So it was already "Go west, young man, go
west!" for new land.
As immigrants in a new country, people tend to seek out
land that is familiar to them.
Stevenson Whitcomb Fletcher, Dean of Agriculture at Penn
State 1939 - 1946, in his "Pennsylvania Agriculture &
Country Life, 1640 - 1840," states that the geological map of
Pennsylvania and Virginia, showing the location of shale and
limestone, is identical to the map of Irish and German settlement.
The Irish preferred the shale, with its streams and
valleys, as in Ireland and western Pennsylvania.
The Germans preferred the limestone, with its rolling
landscape and agriculture, native to Germany, and now found where
Germans settled, first in eastern Pennsylvania, then in the
Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.
So
it was for the Castor family.
Paulus and Gertrud, while in Germany, had a son, Arnold. Arnold 1669 - 1739 had ten children, among them Conrad.
Conrad Castor married Susannah Adams, and they settled in
the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, so by the third generation in
America, they had already moved on to more land in Virginia.
They are said to have had 27 children.
Among them was Benjamin Custard, born 1741. |
