COMMENTS and discussion:
         
         
              WENDEL ESSIG WAS PROBABLY BORN ABOUT 1720.  If he had been
         born "in" or "about" 1700, he would have been nearly 50 when he
         came to America; by that age, he would already have been married,
         with children, probably including sons over 16, by then.  And all
         males over 16 were reguired to sign the ship lists.  There is no
         other Essig on the Edinburgh's September 15, 1749 ship list.  If
         he were born 1719-1720, he could have worked in the mines in
         Alsace-Lorraine "as a youth" from about 1734 to 1740, and also
         have witnessed Frederick the Great's coronation in 1740; then
         could have served in the Army of Frederick the Great for at least
         seven years between 1740 and 1749.
         
              WENDEL ESSIG DID NOT COME TO BALTIMORE.  Documented!
         
              SIMON ESSIG WAS NOT BORN IN HAGERSTOWN.
         
              WENDEL ESSIG WAS NOT MASSACRED BY INDIANS
         
         
                   "Prussian" immigrants who came to Philadelphia often
         paid their passage by indenturing themselves to employers,
         usually in Pennsylvania.  These indentures [often lasted much
         longer than apprenticeship indentures?].  Hence, enormous gaps of
         time may elapse between immigrants' arrival and the appearance of
         their names in any records.
         
                   An exhaustive search of Maryland Archives, tax lists,
         land records, printed accounts of Indian raids, and guite
         extensive church records, for Old Frederick County (which then
         included present-day Montgomery, Frederick, and Washington
         Counties (the latter where Hagerstown is)) from 1750 through 1785
         turned up many Troxells, but failed to uncover any mention of the
         Essig name.
         
                   Hagerstown [did not exist even as a village during the
         time of the French and Indian Wars?].
         
                   Furthermore, there were no Indian raids/massacres in
         that entire area after 1763 (when Simon would have been only
         about 8 or 9 years old).  THE WHOLE PROBLEM HINGES ON ERRONEOUS
         CLAIMS THAT WENDEL WAS EVER IN MARYLAND.
         
                   Valentine Weaver, the father of Simon's son Jacob2
         Essig's wife Elizabeth, [does appear in church records?] from the
         Hagerstown area before he migrated to Stark Co., Ohio [cite Stark
         Co. History] with his three daughters.  Elizabeth gave Maryland
         as her place of birth on the Stark Co., Ohio 1850 Census.
         
                   We suspect that because some settlers of Stark Co.,
         Ohio had indeed come from "near Hagerstown", in the course of
         time a Germanic pronunciation of "Heck(s)town", sounding roughly         like "Hakestown" (see narrative about Drylands Union Church), was
         mistakenly assumed to refer to Hagerstown.
         
                   see also narrative about early German settlement of the
         Forks of the Delaware (Easton) which apparently included
         acquisition (and settlement?) of land across the Delaware River
         (now Phillipsburg) on the New Jersey side.  The timing certainly
         coincides neatly with Wendel's arrival in late 1749.
         
                   If Wendel indeed had been a soldier, especially with
         the rigorous training required by Frederick the Great, there is a
         possibility that he served as a soldier in the colonial army
         (whose records were even more sparse than those of the
         revolutionary militia) during the French and Indian Wars.
         
                   The "Prussian Army firearm" is historically inaccurate
         embroiderywork added in the 1938 History:  Frederick the Great
         would not have allowed ex-soldiers to make of f with his army's
         firearms; no English ship's captain would have allowed his
         "Prussian" passengers to bring firearms of any sort on board;
         the "heirloom gun" now in the collection of the [Museum) in
         Canton is, from the curator's description, an old Pennsylvania
         long rifle-- not the blunderbuss Frederick's soldiers used.
         
                   Pick up narrative about the October 1763 Indian raids
         in the upper Northampton (now Lehigh) area -- when Simon would
         have been going-on 9 years old.
         
                   If Wendel Essig's body had been "consumed in one of the
         burning cabins," how would Simon have known it was he?  In other
         words, Wendel (and others of the family) could have been carried
         off by Indians (as happened in the Hochstetler family), or could
         have fled to somewhere that Simon was unable to find.
         
                   Simon could only have learned the blacksmith trade if
         he had been apprenticed to a blacksmith when he was about 14
         (1769).  The usual term of indenture being seven years, he would
         have fulfilled his indenture in 1776, when he was 21 years old~
         
                   Just because Simon was a blacksmith and may well have
         fought at Trenton and Princeton does not justify another 1938
         added fringe that he "shod General Washington's horse at the
         battle of Trenton."  [As a matter of fact, did Washington and his
         officers have horses waiting for them when they disembarked from
         the boats after crossing the Delaware?)