The search for the family of Adam and George Lough starts on Switzers Gap Run in Pendleton County where Adam, a native of Germany, had settled by 1769. Some 17 years later Adam had an additional 138 acres surveyed there, and his younger brother George acquired his first tract of 68 acres at the same time. Both surveys were done on 16 February 1786.1 Elsewhere we learn that these tracts were on Shavers Run which heads up in Hardy County, runs in a southerly direction through Mill Creek District of Pendleton County, and drains into the South Branch of the Potomac. Adam Lough had been in Virginia for many years, but George Lough had stayed behind in Berks County, Pennsylvania, where he served throughout the Revolution in the Pennsylvania Line. Now that the Loughs have a solid footing in Virginia let us go back to their beginnings:
JOHANN PETER LOCH, a shoemaker at the time of his marriage, was christened on 23 February 1710 at Wolfersweiler in Saarland, a son of Johann Loch and his wife Maria Elizabeth, according to the Kirchen-buch of that place. When grown he made his way a few kilometers east to Baumholder in the Rhineland-Palatinate, now (and no doubt then) a larger place with greater opportunities. He married Eve Elizabetha Bollman there on 3 July 1736. She was born on 29 November 1718 at Aulenbach in Baumholder, a daughter of Johann Nickel and Anna Ursula (Hammen) Bollman who had married at Baumholder on 20 February 1716.2 Peter Lough and his father-in-law Johan Nickell Bollman came to Philadelphia in the Loyal Judith in 1739.
The Loyal Judith was one of a convoy of three ships which crossed the Atlantic together and docked at Philadelphia on the same day. The other two ships were the Robert and Alice, and the Friendship. There was another family of Lochs, cousins from Weiersbach (which is within spitting distance of Wolfersweiler), on board the Friendship. They will be noticed later. The men aged 16 years and over (including Loch's eldest brother-in-law John Adam Bollman, now 18) qualified at the courthouse on 3 September 1739. Their allegiance was certified by Edward Paynter, master of the Loyal Judith.3
Peter Lough had settled by 1745 in the Tulpehocken Valley where two of his younger children were christened. He later acquired 130 acres of land in Alsace Township in Berks County where Peter Loch and Michael Maurer (who we will meet later) were taxed in 1767.4 In addition to his two sons who went to Pendleton County there was another son John who was baptized on 14 March 1745 at Christ Lutheran Church, Stouchburg, as a son of Peter and Eva Elizabeth Loch.5 Peter and his wife also had at least two daughters. Maria Elizabeth was living unmarried (perhaps still in her teens) in 1765, and Anna Elizabeth (perhaps a bit younger) was baptized on 11 March 1750 at Trinity Church at Tulpehocken. No marriage has yet been found for either daughter in Berks County.
This is perhaps the proper place to introduce the difficulties in sorting out certain references to Peter Lough (and his sons) in Berks County and in Virginia. They are generally known as Loch or Lock, but there was another family in Berks County named Lack (and near variants).6 Mary Harter, the first serious genealogist of Pendleton County families, undertook a search for the ancestry of George Lough for a client living in Seal Beach, California, in 1981. She got back (correctly) to the Tulpehocken Valley where so many of the early German families of Pendleton County originated. She did an enormous amount of work reading the original German church registers in that area and found the baptism of Adam Lough's daughter at Reading on 4 April 1765.7 However she got so bogged down in the confusing references to the Lack/Lauck/Laux family and the conflicting names and dates in Berks County that she could not come to any conclusion about the Lock/Loch/Loeh family of her client's husband.8
Peter Loch was living as late as 1768 on his farm of 100 acres in Alsace Township where he was taxed 10 shillings on his land and two horses, four cattle and two sheep. There is no surviving tax list for the next 11 years and it may be taken as likely that Peter died without the benefit of probate in Alsace Township in this period, 1768-1779. 9
JOHANN ADAM LOCH, Peter's eldest son (and the Adam Lough who left a large family in Pendleton County), was born on 8 August 1737 and was christened three days later at Baumholder, Germany. 10 He married, by what can only be a considerable coincidence, Maria Barbara Lack, a daughter of the family which has been so easily confused with his own. He was married as Adam Loeh at the Host Reformed Church at Tuplehocken on 4 March 1760, and he and Barbara appear to have had several daughters in rather quick succession. Unfortunately only one christening has been found to date for any of his children. Maria Elizabeth, daughter of Adam and Maria Barbara Loeh, was born on 18 March 1765 and christened on April 4th at Trinity Lutheran Church at Reading. Peter Loeh [the grandfather], and Maria Elizabeth Loeh, a sister [of the father] were the sponsors. Alsace Township adjoins Reading on the east and the party obviously came from there. This is the last mention of Adam Lough in Pennsylvania.
He was in Pendleton County by 3 May 1769 when he purchased (as Adam Lock) 88 acres from Nicholas Seybert for £10, described as being on the mountain between the South Fork and the South Branch of the Potomac. It had been patented to Jacob Seybert, the father of the grantor, on 10 November 1757 and adjoined Michael Mallow's line.11 Traditionally Adam and Barbara are said to have first settled briefly in a cave at the head of Reed's Creek until their cabin could be built.12 On 10 October 1772 Adam Loff and Adam Harpole were witnesses to the will of George Fultz. The widow Catherine Barbara Fultz qualified as executor on 16 March 1773 with Nicholas Harpole and Adam Loft as her sureties.13 On 14 October 1772 he had 53 acres adjoining Adam Harpole and his own land surveyed.14 To this he added a further 80 acres on Shavers Run, described as a branch of the South Fork of the Potomac, on 3 November 1773.15 He appears on an early tax list of 1777 with one tithable (himself) and his 88 acres.16 He is found with regularity thereafter in the records until his death at the age of 63 during the winter of 1789-90 at KIine in Pendleton County.17 He was doubtless buried there.
Adam Lough's will ("being very sick & weak in body") was signed on 5 November 1789. His wife Barbara was named executrix and given wide powers to pay his debts and to care for his children. His eldest son Adam, then scarcely ten years old, was given twelve years after he came of age to make yearly payments to his brothers and sisters. If he elected to make these payments (which were to be based on an appraisal of the value of his plantation) then Adam was to have his father's land. If not, it was to be sold at public vendue and Adam was to have £10 above an equal share of the proceeds as the eldest son and heir of his father. Two daughters, Catherine and Mary, apparently already married, were not to have their payment until the rest of the children had been paid. The implication is that they had some small settlement at the time of their marriage. These are the only three children mentioned by name, but it appears that he was survived by at least 12 children at the time of his death. The will was apparently written by Robert Poage, and he and Jacob Conrad (who had also lived earlier in the Tulpehocken Valley) were the two witnesses. He signed his will as Adam Loch, although he is called Lough in the text.18 The widow Barbara last appears in the tax lists in 1810. She outlived her husband by some 20 years and died in June or July of the same year.
There has been an certain amount of confusion between the 12 children of Adam and Barbara and their 13 cousins (with many of the same given names) born to George and Mary Lough.19 Jeff Carr of Charlottesville, Virginia, has made an intensive study of the Loughs of the second generation in Virginia and has documented the following children of Adam Lough:
All of his sons stayed in Pendleton County. Adam, John, George, and Conrad Lough (aged 69, 68, 65 and 62) were all farming there in the 1850 census.
GEORGE LOCH. No christening has been found for this man but he seems to have been born about 1750.22 According to descendants he served for four years and four months in the Revolutionary army "under Washington throughout the struggle for independence."23 He can be safely identified with the George Lough who was a private in the Second Regiment of the Pennsylvania Continental Line. The records of the army raised in Pennsylvania were largely lost by fire soon after the war, but a few lists of irregular musters taken of the regiment survive.24 From one of them we learn that George Lough was on active duty in May 1780 in the company lately commanded by Captain Jacob Ashmead, under Colonel Waiter Stewart.
George Lough was still with his company on the early night of 1 January 1781 when a New Year's celebration turned into a revolt by the Pennsylvania Line. It numbered about 2400 men and was about a quarter of Washington's entire army. Their mutiny has been blamed on Scotch-Irish who formed about two-thirds of the Line; the remaining third of the men of German descent were said to have been more docile. There can be no doubt that their grievances did represent a overt breach of a contract which had promised to furnish food, clothing and pay to the army. Instead the troops were starving, nearly naked, and paid with paper money that was as worthless as it was late. The Pennsylvania Line had enlisted for three years, but when a number of men who had served their three years called for their discharges they were not only refused but roughly handled and kept against their wishes for an additional year.25
The Continental Congress and the Pennsylvania Council cooperated to set right their mistakes. The Pennsylvania Line was immediately disbanded, but the troops were furnished with clothes for their journey home. They also promised that the matter of back pay was to be settled with an adjustment for depreciation in the value of the currency. George Lough was one of those soldiers in the Continental Line who was entitled to depreciated pay, but his certificate was never redeemed and escheated to the state.26
His service with the army lasting over four years (and correctly reported by his descendants) was over and he went back to Berks County. He was home later in 1781 when he was taxed £2.5.0d as a "single freeman" in Cumru Township where he either lived with, or near, his uncle John Bollman.27
He and his intended wife Anna Maria Siehl were sponsors on 19 May 1782 at the baptism of Maria Sarah, a daughter of William Philipps and his unnamed wife at St. John's (Hain's) Church.28 The marriage of the Loughs followed only six days later, on 25 May 1782, when she is called Maria Magdalena Siehl.29 Johannes, the son of Georg Loch and his unnamed wife, was christened at the same church on 3 August 1783.30 His wife's name is remembered by descendants as Mary Seal and is said to have been "1/2 Penn Dutch."31 The name of her mother is unknown, but Mary was probably the daughter of Edward Seal of English descent.32 The young couple left soon after for Shaver's Run in Pendleton County, probably in the fall of 1783.
He is found listed a few months later in the 1784 tax list of Rockingham County.33 He and his adjacent older brother Adam are both called Hole by John Davis, the collector on the South Branch in what is now Pendleton County. The German loch does mean "hole" in English, but this is the only time that we have found them with this surname in Virginia. This list is also interesting as it gives the number of "white souls" found in every household. Adam Hole had ten, while the younger George had only four.34
George Lough was named as Lieutenant in the Lower South Branch Company of the Pendleton County Militia, (serving under Captain James Skidmore) at the formation of the new county. His commission was probably an appointment owed to his long experience as an enlisted man in the Revolution. He had prospered by 1788 (if livestock can be considered as a measure of wealth) when he was taxed on eight horses, while his brother Adam possessed only two.35
George Lough left Pendleton County soon after the 1810 census was taken.36 He settled with a part of his sons in the Hacker Valley in what is now Webster (then Randolph) County, West Virginia. He died there shortly before 25 February 1818 when an appraisal was made of his estate. A vendue sale was held and Nicholas Gibson, the administrator, in his final account showed that the widow had taken away personal property appraised at $90.83 (including her coffee mill, a Dutch oven, a spinning wheel, and more). The entire estate totalled $306.55.37 Before he died George Lough entered into an Articles of Agreement with his sons Philip and Edward Lough dated 26 September 1816 for the support of his wife Mary and himself. The sons were to have the land that their parents lived on. In return they were to pay the other heirs $40.00 each after his death at intervals of 18 months, beginning with the eldest and ending with the youngest.38 This was not unlike the arrangement that his brother Adam had made for the benefit of his children. Mary Lough survived her husband for many years and is last noticed in December 1824 on the marriage bond of her daughter Elizabeth.
Jeff Carr, again using receipts from his heirs (which clearly shows that there were 13 children), tax lists, and marriage registers has produced a complete list of George Lough's family:
A final note. Jacob and Johannes Loch, aged 35 and 16, who came on the Friendship, seem to have settled in Tinicum Township, Bucks County, although the computed date of Jacob's birth (from a burial record) does not match up with his age on the passenger list of the Friendship. At the time of her death Jacob's second wife Anna Sybilla Loch (who he had married in Germany) is said to have been born at "Weyerbach in the Palatinate."40 Jeff Cart identifies this with Weiersbach (hard by Wolfersweiler), and it appears that Jacob Loch's family came from that area as well.
1. Peter Kline Kaylor, assisted by George Warren Chappelear, Abstract of Land Grant Surveys, 1761-1791, Rockingham County Historical Society, (Harrisonburg, 1938), 116. Henry Switzer (and Switzer's Meadows near Peaked Mountain) are mentioned in 1761. Kline is the nearest place found on modern maps.
2. Annette Kunselman Burgert, Eighteenth Century Emigrants from German-Speaking Lands to North America, Volume II, The Western Palatinate. The Pennsylvania German Society (1985) 59, 153, 223-4. The Baumholder Lutheran Parish register starts in 1701, and includes families living in Aulenbach and several other small villages in the area. This account is reprinted from Burgert's Pennsylvania Pioneers from Wolfersweiler Parish, Saarland, Germany (AKB Publications, 691 Weavertown Road, Myerstown, PA 17067-2642).
3. Ralph Beaver Strassburger, Pennsylvania German Pioneers: a publication of the early lists of arrivals in the port of Philadelphia from 1727 to 1808 (Norristown, 1934) I, 269. The Bollmans signed their names in German script, but Peter Lough made only an O as his mark. John Adam Bollman, reckoned as an adult, had been baptized at Baumholder on 6 April 1721.
4. Pennsylvania Archives, series III, volume 18, page 27.
5. The sponsor at his christening was John Bollman, presumably his uncle Johannes Bollman who was born on 17 May 1729 (Burgert, II 59). The only adult John Lough found in Pennsylvania in this period was born about 1750 and married Elizabeth Speedy on 13 April 1773 at Abington, Montgomery (then Philadelphia) County. He served in Captain Walter McKinney's company of Cumberland County Militia in 1781-2, and was buried in March 1816 in the Burnt Meeting House Cemetery in Grant District, Monongalia County, West Virginia. He is sometimes said to have been a son (which is unlikely) or a grandson (possible) of the Jacob Loch on the Friendship.
6. Another complication is the pronunciation of Lough. Apparently in early Berks County, and in Pendleton County down to date, the name rhymes with joke. In Lewis County, and no doubt elsewhere, descendants are known as low.
7. Four completely indexed volumes of transcripts by F. Edward Wright, Berks County church records of the 18th century, have lately been published by Family Line Publications of Westminster, Maryland. They were not available to Mrs. Hatter (who died in 1992), nor did she know about the Bollman connection in both Germany and Berks County. Interested readers should watch for later volumes in this series.
8. I am indebted to Lillian Lough Martz of Magnolia Springs, Alabama, for copies of Mrs. Hatter's seven reports. In the last of these (15 October 1981) she writes of the christening in 1765 that "While just now we have no PROOF this is the Adam Lough who appears in (now) Pendleton Co., there is a good chance that it is." She would be happy to know that her supposition was correct.
9. Pennsylvania Archives, III, 18, 97. Proprietory and state tax lists survive for Alsace Township for the years 1767, 1768, 1779, 1780, 1781, 1784, and 1785 and are reprinted here.
10. Burgert, 223.
11. Lyman Chalkley, Chronicles of the Scotch-Irish Settlement in Virginia, III, 494. Both the Seyberts and the Mallows were old neighbors of the Loughs from the Tuplehocken Valley.
12. This is to be taken with some caution as Deer Run drains the eastern side of North Mountain and is a considerable distance from Shaver's Run. There is nothing to suggest that Adam Lough, Senior, ever lived on Deer Run. In the 1823 tax list James Skidmore owned two tracts of 166 and 40 acres on Reed's Creek (six miles north of the courthouse at Franklin) purchased from Adam Lough. In the same tax list Adam Lough, Junior, had 125 1/2 acres, and his brother John 12 1/2 acres at an unnamed place nine miles northeast of the courthouse. Isaac R. Lough reportedly still lives (1995) on Deer Run about 100 yards from the cave which is said to have been an early home of the family. The titles to these tracts have not been traced.
13. Chalkley, III, 127. Nicholas Harpole and Adam Lock were back in court on 19 March 1776 (Chalkley, I, 187) when John Oldham, who had married the widow Barbara Fultz, demanded counter security.
14. Kaylor, 73.
15. Kaylor, 83. Jeff Carr points out that this is an error on the survey; Shavers Run flows into the South Branch of the Potomac.
16. Allegheny Regional Ancestors, I (Winter 1992) 50.
17. In 1788, shortly before his death, be was taxed on two horses but his brother George (who had prospered) was taxed on eight horses.
18. Pendleton County Will Book I, page 6.
19. For the descendants of Adam Lough see also Oren F. Morton, A history of Pendleton County, West Virginia (1910), 251-2. The material published there is to be received with considerable caution; there is, for example, no evidence to support the marriage of a daughter Catherine to George Teter.
20. It seems likely that he died on 14 June 1852 since his will written in May 1852 was probated on 6 January 1853. His age at death (80 years, 5 months, 18 days as it appears on his tombstone) is also suspect. It seems most likely that the instructions given to the stonecutter (perhaps long after his death) were wrong. His wife Sarah is said to have been born on 6 May 1775 and died on 18 April 1858.
21. No marriage has been found for the Catherine Lough mentioned in her father's will. Catherine may have been the first or middle German name of one of the other daughters listed above. This list of the children of Adam Lough has been taken from the Pendleton County Order Book 6 (1808-14), 47; Will Book I, page 6; and the Personal Property Tax Lists (where the sons of the widow Barbara am identified as such in 1810 and 1811). Distinctions between cousins of the same name have been made using the census schedules and marriage registers of Pendleton, Harrison, and Lewis Counties.
22. The only information that we have as to his age is the 1810 census of Pendleton County where both he and his wife were listed as over 45, hence born before 1765.
23. Portrait and biographical records of Effingham, Jasper and Richland Counties, Illinois (Chicago, 1893) 457-9.
24. Pennsylvania Archives, Fifth Series, volume II, 837, 879; also IV, 119.
25. For the events of the New Year's night, see Rupert Hughes, George Washington, The Savior of the States 1777-1781 (New York, 1930), 590-4.
26. The cancelled certificates for depreciated pay are at the Pennsylvania State Library.
27. John Bollman, his uncle was a prosperous blacksmith in Cumru Township. He was buried at Hain's Church near Wernersville in Berks County where the date of his birth on his tombstone (born 17 May 1728, died November 1803) is off by a year according to the register of the Baumholder Reformed Church. In 1779 he was taxed 3,378 shillings (in the depreciated money of the day) on 300 acres, four horses and six cattle.
28. F. Edward Wright, Berks County church records of the 18th Century, Ill, 143. The sponsors were sometimes related to the parents, but we do not at present have any clue to suggest a kinship with William Philipps.
29. It is not possible to decide which was the correct form of her name as she was never called anything other than Mary or Polly in Virginia. Siehl (which is correct) has been transcribed elsewhere wrongly as Diehl.
30. Wright, III, 144. St. John's (Hain's) Reformed Church in Lower Heidelberg Township.
31. This fact, his Revolutionary service, a family tree, and some other miscellaneous notes written by Norman A. Lough (1852-1925) survive. They were apparently based on the recollections of his grandmother Prudence (Gibson) Lough who made her home with his parents after she was widowed in 1860. Mr. Lough was the City Attorney of Olney, Illinois, and later practiced law in Chicago. He died at Long Beach, California.
32. A cursory search in Berks and adjoining counties has not turned up a probate for Edward under any of the likely variants of his surname. Michael Mauer, son of the late Michael Mauer, married Elizabeth Siel, daughter of the late Edward Siel, on 24 July 1785. (Wright, III, 231.) Michael Mauer, doubtless the father, was taxed in Alsace Township in 1767. Siel and Siehl are presumably the way that the German pastors heard the English name Seal.
33. It is printed (in lieu of the lost census for Virginia) in Heads of Families at the First Census [of 1790] ... Virginia (1908), 77.
34. George Lough can not have had two children this early, which suggests that perhaps an aged mother or a sister came from Pennsylvania with him.
35. John W. Wayland, Virginia Valley Records (1965), 105.
36. George Lough, Sr., is last listed in the 1810 tax list of Pendleton County.
37. Randolph County Will Book II, 61-5.
38. lbid., 36-7.
39. In addition to the sources mentioned in the text see the Braxton County Deed Book I, pages 2, 28, 457, and the Nicholas County Deed Book III, pages 399, 469.
40. Rev. John Hinke, Kellers Lutheran Church Records (Bucks County Genealogical Society) 102. Mrs. Jacob Loch: "1768 - April 23, died Anna Sybilla Loch, born at Weyerbach in the Palatinate, September 28, 1693, buried April 24, 1765, age 74 years, 7 months, 4 days, left 7 children and 16 grandchildren." Earlier we find: "1753 - Jacob Loch, born at Weyerbach, township of Naumburg, in Baaden, in the year 1687, his age 66 years" a flat contradiction. The register of Fischbach (near Herrstein) is at Dusseldorf in the Archiv der Evangelischen Kirche im Rheinland, (and available at Salt Lake City on Family History Library reels 0489840-2). They include Weiersbach in the Rhineland-Palatinate, and christenings found there settle the contradiction. I am most grateful to Judy Cassidy of Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, for enlarged copies from the register and for much more information on the Loch family of Bucks County than has been possible to use here.
The Allegheny Regional Family History Society