PANKENIER FAMILY ANCESTRY

A brief timeline on the Pankenier family's immigration to New Jersey from 1705-1945

     Greetings, and thank you for taking the time to visit my website on the Pankenier family. This website has all of the information that I have been able to uncover on the Pankenier Family.

     I have been researching the Pankeniers for over two years now, and it has been a fascinating journey With the help of online digital archives, I have been able to piece together the Pankenier family history and can shed a little light on the fascinating lives that they had lived.

     I am still looking for photos, documents, and details on the Pankeniers that lived in New Jersey, and the descendants of these remarkable families. If you have suggestions or would like to contribute to the website; my email address is:   mpankenier@msn.com 
     Scrolling down this webpage with show you several blog entries that give details on where the Pankeniers lived, and the political and social climate at that time. In addition, I have provided a brief summary below of what has been uncovered, and how the Pankeniers ended up in Jersey City. If you find anything that is inaccurate, or would like to include additional information, please let me know!

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 The Origin of the Pankenier Family:

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     The origin of the Pankenier Ancestry starts in the mid-1500s in southern France. It is believed that the origin of the Pankenier surname was likely French, and would likely be " Panqueniere", or perhaps "de la Panqueniere". During the mid-1500s, France was going thru a religious reformation, and a large part of the population had abandoned the Christian faith, in favor of the newly established Protestant religion. A large part of the French population was then converted to Calvinism, or became Huguenots, which was a predecessor to modern-day Lutheranism; a religion that some Pankenier Descendents practice to this day. 

     The French Roman Catholic clergy, could not accept the French Huguenots, which resulted in harassment, and forcible conversion of thousands of Protestants which continued for nearly two hundred years. The hostilities increased until the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572, where Catholics killed thousands of Huguenots purely based on religion alone. Finally, in 1685, Louis XIV pronounced Edict of Nantes, which ended the religious conflict, but also labeled Huguenots as heretics.

     Over the next several years, more than 400,000 of the French Protestants fled from France and immigrated to England, Prussia, Netherlands, and America. There is strong evidence that our forebears were among those 400,000 since the Prussian church records for Pankeniers/Pankniers only date back to the first quarter of the 18th century.

The French Huguenots received an open invitation to relocate to Prussia, and documents indicate that the Pankenier family settled in Finckenstein Prussia sometime around the 1720s.

     The Pankeniers were then assimilated into the predominantly German culture, gradually adopting the language, the customs, and eventually, the French surname was adapted into the German lexicon as "Pankenier". Other adaptations of the French surname have been uncovered in Prussia, including a family named "Pankner", and another family named "Panknir". Both of these families lived in neighboring towns, about a dozen miles from the Pankenier family, and are very likely to be distant relatives. 

     The Pankeniers and their distant relatives remained in Prussia until the late 1800s, when the Prussian Empire had begun to collapse. Eventually, the Pankenier family decided to immigrate to America to escape the conflict and political unrest within Prussia. The Pankeniers were not the only descendants to immigrate from Prussia. The Pankner family also immigrated to Chicago the 1860's; while the Pankeniers settled in Jersey City around 1885, and remained in Jersey City until the late 1960s. 

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