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Beginning with a trickle in the 1680s and growing into a virtual flood by the 1720s, immigrants from Germany's Rhineland area and the German-speaking cantons of Switzerland arrived in southeastern Pennsylvania by the thousands. The majority of these immigrants established farming communities which flourish to this day, while others migrated south through Western Maryland and the great Valley of Virginia, spreading their bloodlines throughout the South. Still other German immigrants went directly to New York, establishing towns and villages in the Hudson and Mohawk valleys in which their descendants continue to live; while others immigrated to the struggling colony of Georgia or to the Republic of Texas.

This was the first "ethnic" migration to be officially documented--mainly in the form of ships' passenger lists, records of indenture, naturalization records, land records, tax lists, and sundry church records. Including the earliest passenger arrivals at Philadelphia in 1683, the Swiss and Rhineland arrivals at Philadelphia from 1727 onward, the Palatine immigrants in New York in 1710, the Salzburgers in Georgia in the 1730s, the Texas-Germans of the 1840s, and a host of other groups, as many as 300,000 German and Swiss immigrants and settlers have been identified in a score of books published by the Genealogical Publishing Company, all of which appear on this CD, united by a single electronic index. These are the most authoritative works on German and Swiss immigration, and include the famous Pennsylvania German Pioneers, the most complete collection of colonial passenger lists ever published, as well as several works devoted to Palatine immigration and the later emigration from the port of Bremen.

Information provided in these books includes a selection of the following elements: name, age, occupation, place and date of departure and arrival, date and place of birth and marriage, place of residence, names of family members, and lines of descent for several generations. The following books are included on this CD:

*Pennsylvania German Pioneers: A Publication of the Original Lists of Arrivals in the Port of Philadelphia from 1727 to 1808. 2 vols.
*Rhineland Emigrants: Lists of German Settlers in Colonial America<.i>
*Pennsylvania German Immigrants, 1709-1786
*True and Authentic Register of Persons Who in the Year 1709 Journeyed from Germany to America
*List of Germans from the Palatinate Who Came to England in 1709
*Early Eighteenth Century Palatine Emigration
*The Book of Names, Especially Relating to the Early Palatines and the First Settlers in the Mohawk Valley
*A Collection of Upwards of Thirty Thousand Names of German, Swiss, Dutch, French and Other Immigrants in Pennsylvania from 1727 to 1776
*The Germans of Colonial Georgia, 1733-1783
*Naturalizations of Foreign Protestants in the American and West Indian Colonies
*Names of Foreigners Who Took the Oath of Allegiance to the Province and State of Pennsylvania, 1727-1775
*Persons Naturalized in the Province of Pennsylvania, 1740-1733
*The Settlement of the German Coast of Louisiana and Creoles of German Descent
*German Immigrant Servant Contracts . . . at the Port of Philadelphia, 1817-1831
*A New Land Beckoned: German Immigration to Texas, 1844-1847
*New Homes in a New Land: German Immigration to Texas, 1847-1861
*German Immigrants: Lists of Passengers Bound from Bremen to New York, 1847-1871. 4 vols.