June 22, 2001

Jerry Mower
615 Country Road 123
Bedford, Wyoming 83112

Jerry:

Briel/Brill/Bruehl Research Report as a result of three days research in the archive at Kassel, Germany during the week of May 29-31, 2001:

The Landeskirche of Hessen-Kassel has filmed most of the districts belonging to this area from Kassel in the North to Hanau in the South with the exception of district Gelnhausen, Land Kassel, Land Kirchhain, and Kreis Melsungen.

Without a doubt the Brills are from Kreis Wetter where the name Briehl with various spellings is found mostly as well as the given names they used. I have now extracted every Briehl name from this area and feel confident it includes the Pennsylvania Brills.

The conditions of the existing church records are good, but the Pastor has seldom included a mother's name in the christening entries. I have come to the conclusion that Pastors did omit recording some christening entries.

The Briehls/Bruel of several villages marry into the Heldmann family which has been traced back from Pennsylvania to the Wetter region.

One Henrich Briel from Amönau married on 2 Dec. 1750 in Unterrosphe, his wife is a Funck from the village Göttingen (Funcks are also in Pennsylvania together with Brills) and they have a son Johannes in 1751, christened in Göttingen. After this, they disappear from the area. This must be the Johann Henrich Briehll on the ship Halifax in 1754.

The Strassburger and Hinke book lists as a land of origin for some of the passengers on ship Halifax in October of 1754 Hesse. I have now learned that the King of Prussia held back for a time a number of emigrants passing through Cologne and refused to give them permission to pass through.

They obviously traveled to Cologne to go on a ship on the Rhine to take them to Rotterdam. This could have been the route of travel for the people from Kreis Wetter.

Please study the enclosed extracted records of Briehl names. There are several possibilities.

I'm enclosing a booklet which gives a list of towns microfilmed at the archive Kassel. I marked them all when I did a search in those towns. You will see there are many. The district of Rotenburg doesn't show any Brill, etc. The district of Fritzlar doesn't either. The only Brills I have to say again are in the district of Wetter, just north of Marburg.

May I ask for another $750.00 for my time.

Sincerely,

Trudy Schenk

[Trudy has been paid by our Association for this work]