The Rorabaugh family line has been traced by many researchers and published by at least two authors. The most exhaustive of these is by Lewis Bunker Rohrbach in his Volume III, The Rohrbach Genealogy, 1982 Edition. The purpose of this document is to set forth notes which I took from Mr. Rohrbach's writings in order to trace the lineage from our earliest known family member down to my own generation. Much of what follows can then be considered a condensation of Mr. Rohrbach's writings...much of it in his own words. I have used my own words when necessary to fill in the storyline.

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According to Lewis Bunker Rohrbach, the earliest member of our branch of the Rohrbach family for whom records have been found thus far is:
 

CLAUS ROHRBACH. Claus was born about 1565 in the vicinity of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He died in 1617 in the village of Seckbach and was buried Oct. 2, 1617 in the village of Bergen, Germany, both villages slightly northeast of Frankfurt am Main. Claus Rohrbach had at least five children by his first wife, Gertraud, maiden name unknown, whom he married at some date prior to 1600.

JOHANN ROHRBACH, Claus Rohrbach's third son, was born about 1610 in or near Frankfurt am Main. He was only seven years old when his father died in 1617, and was only 14 years old when his step-father, Johann Conrad Plaum, died in Bergen in 1624. At that time in Europe occupations were neither lightly nor easily acquired, and we can presume that Johann was a baker because his step-father had been one. The record of Johann Rohrbach's death in Bergen in 1690 calls him both baker and "Gastgeber" ie. innkeeper. He spent all his life in Bergen, living through the pestilence which swept Bergen in 1612 and through the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). Only one child given below has been found for him and even this one child must have been a great surprise to the parents, as the mother, Catharina, was then roughly 43 years old. Johann's first wife was Maria Runen whom he married in May 16 1635. Maria was buried Feb. 12, 1647. After Maria's death, Johann married June 15, 1647 in Bergen to Catharina, maiden name unknown. This child of Johann and Catharina Rohrbach,

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JOHANN REINHARD ROHRBACH, was baptized Oct. 8, 1648 in Bergen, Germany. Johann Reinhard spent his entire life in the village of Bergen as did his father before him. Evidently he served as a baptism sponsor in the Reformed Church at the unusually young age of 9. Also, he was a minor court official as the record of his death on Jan. 4, 1716 indicates. Johann Reinhard married Magdalena Fischer, Feb. 12, 1667. This couple had five children, the first two being twin boys:

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JOHANN HEINRICH ROHRBACH and Johann Conrad Rohrbach, baptized Nov. 3, 1668 in Bergen, Germany. Johann Heinrich was confirmed at the age of 14. On Nov. 26, 1691 he married Margaretha Elisabetha Wentzel. The couple bore six children.

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JOHANN REINHART ROHRBACH, born March 17, 1699 was the 3rd child of Johann Heinrich and Margaretha Elisabetha Rohrbach. Baptized Mar. 23, 1699, the child's grandfather Johann Reinhard Rohrbach was godfather.

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John Reinhart Rohrbach, the immigrant ancestor of most of the Rohrbach's (of various spellings) of West Virginia and ancestor of many of those in the western United States, was on of the oldest Rohrbach immigrants to America. He was fifty years old at the time of his immigration from Germany in 1749, had been married twice, and had fathered several children by his first wife.

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John Reinhart was born in the village of Bergen, in the Hesse Hanan area of southern Germany. His great, great grandfather, Claus, had moved to Bergen in about 1614, perhaps from the nearby Frankfurt am Main where a prominent Rohrbach family had settled in the fourteenth century. Yet, at the time of his marriage in Bergen to Anna Margaretha Koch, June 10, 1727, Johann Reinhart moved to his wife's home village of Hochstadt. The Koch family had been living in Hochstadt for several generations at least.

Early in the spring of 1749, soon after he turned age 50, and only slightly more than a year after his remarriage, Johann Reinhart decided to immigrate to America. Certainly economic considerations were among his most important considerations. He died late in 1765 in Cumru Township, Berks County, PA, just south of the town of Reading, PA.

JOHN RORABAUGH was born in July 1740 in the village of Hochstadt, Germany. He was baptized, Johann Conrad Rohrbach, in the Reformed Church in Hochstadt on July 31, 1740. He was a mere boy of 9 when he immigrated with his father and step-mother to America and thus he did not sign the Oath of Abjuration in 1749 was required of all males aged 16 and upwards. Even though John Rorabaugh's full name appears to have been Johann Conrad Rohrbach, all American records yet found for him consistently call him John Rorabaugh or some spelling variant of that.

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John Rorabaugh married about 1760 either in Berks county, PA or in the part of Augusta Co., W. Va. which is now Hardy Co., W. Va. to Barbara Rueger. She was born about 1740 in Tulpehocken Twp, Berks Co., PA (at the time Philadelphia Co., PA) and died after February 14, 1795 on the same farm with her husband, where she is said to be buried beside him. Barbara Rueger was the daughter of Antoni Rueger and his wife Catharina (Schoch) Rueger, who had immigrated from Switzerland in 1737. John Rorabaugh died Oct. 30, 1821 on his farm along the South Fork of the South Branch of the Potamac River in what is now Hardy Co., West Virginia.

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We know with very comfortable certainty that John Rorabaugh is identical with the Johann Conrad Rohrbach baptized in 1740 in Hochstadt, Germany from family tradition, from the mass of circumstantial evidence, and perhaps most importantly from the name John Rorabaugh chose for his first son: Anthony Reinhart Rorabaugh, thus names for both of his grandfathers: his mother's father, Antoni Rueger from Switzerland, and his father's father Johann Reinhart Rohrbach from Germany.

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It is not known exactly when John Rorabaugh married Barbara Rueger, nor whether the marriage took place in Berks County, PA or in Virginia. While most of the Rueger family had left Berks County during the 1740's, Barbara Rueger's aunt had stayed behind. The aunt was born in Switzerland and came to America with the family in 1737 and settled with them in Tulpehocken. She was then a girl of 18, and fairly soon she married Frederich Gerhardt in Berks County, and the couple stayed in Berks County when the rest of the Ruegers moved to Virginia. Quite possibly Barbara Rueger, born about 1740 in Tulpehocken, who would have been less than eight years old when the family moved to Virginia, remained behind in Berks County as well. Certainly this would account for John Rorabaugh meeting and marrying her in about 1760, and it also would explain why, by 1761, John Rorabaugh had moved from his father's farm in Berks County to settle in the South Branch Valley in what was then Augusta County, Virginia, close by his new bride's family.

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On May 29, 1761 John Rorabaugh bought 400 acres of land by the South Fork of the South Branch of the Potomac River in Augusta Co., VA. It was here that John spent the remaining sixty years of his life, living through the last of the Indian Wars, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812.

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Lewis Bunker Rohrbach lists quite a number of isolated events in the life of John Rorabaugh in his genealogy; but, for this summary I will mention only the following:

By 1782, after the Revolutionary War, the many state and county legislatures had turned to settling accounts of all types. Thus it was, that in a bound manuscript volume for Hampshire County, page 4, we find:

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"At a Court held and continued for Hampshire county 15th May, 1782, the County proceeded to receive and certify public Claims for impressments etc. agreeable to a late Act of Assembly, as follows, vis:

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John Rorebaugh pasturage and corn for the Militia marching to Carolina L O: 10: 6."

 This reimbursement for supplies provided by John Rorabaugh to the Militia during the Revolution forms the basis for membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution and other such organizations by his numerous descendants.

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John Rorabaugh made his will on August 12, 1818. He was then 78 years old and had raised a family of nine children, three sons and six daughters, on what was then still a fairly dangerous frontier. He had participated in two great migrations, first from the settled and perhaps staid village of Hochstadt near Frankfurt am Main, Germany to the raw settlements of Berks County, Pennsylvania, and then as a young man migrating south on to what was then very much the frontier area of Virginia. John's farm still exists, owned today by a direct descendant William Hayes Judy, Jr., but the original log cabin and sprint house are now gone. Their site, just north of Rohrbaugh Run, is still visible.

Thus, John Rorabaugh's life came to an end, having lived through 81 years of the most exciting times in America's history. His descendants have spread all across America's 50 states and into many foreign countries, continuing the wanderlust so common to Americans.

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JOHN RORABAUGH, JR., born August 1, 1768, was raised there on the Rorabaugh homestead in the South Branch Valley of the Potomac River, Hardy County, near the present town of Peru, W. Virginia. Little is known about his young life, but he seemed to have moved from Hardy County in about 1796, probably at about the time of his marriage. Land records suggest that he moved westward and initially settled in Randolph County.

At that time the Virginia government granted 400 acres of land to anyone who would go up over the mountains to unsettled land and build a cabin there and raise a crop of grain, no matter how small. In addition a preemption right to one thousand more acres adjoining the 400 acres existed and could be secured by a warrant from the land office. Census records for this area of Virginia over the next 40 years indicated that John moved into Lewis county and then back to Randolph County where he died in June or July, 1842.

Of John Rorabaugh, Jr.'s children, up to as many as 12 children living at home at one time, only three sons are known...John, Nathan, and Anthony.

NATHAN RORABAUGH was born June 30, 1811 in Randolph County, W. Virginia. After his marriage in 1834 to Margaret Mitchell, he farmed in that part of Randolph County which in 1843 became part of the newly formed Barbour County.

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In 1857, the family joined America's great move westward. Initially they settled in Garden Plain, Whiteside Co., Illinois, where they remained until 1860, then moving that year to Union Twp, Scotland Co., Missouri where they spent the remainder of their lives.

Nathan's descendants spell the name Rorabaugh, Rorabough, & Rorabaw. The second son, John Mitchell, born March 16, 1837 in Randolph County was found in the 1885 census in Appanoose Co, Iowa as John M. Rorabaw and some sources say he is buried under that spelling.
 

JOHN MITCHELL RORABAW was newly married to Mary Ellen Clark, and she not yet 15, when the move onward to Missouri from Garden Plains, Illinois took place. After living in Missouri for twelve years, John Mitchell and his family moved again, to Appanoose Co., Iowa. He is said to have made and sold a salve used for rheumatism and similar aches and pains. John died Nov. 19, 1912, Diamond, Missouri, and was buried there.

 

John Rorabaw and Mary's oldest daughter, Nancy Josephine, was born December 17, 1863, Scotland Co, Missouri. Other children followed. The youngest daughter of John and Mary Ellen, Eliza Jane, was born in Appanoose Co, Iowa on Jan. 9, 1886. It appears that John and Mary Ellen were divorced after this time. Mary Ellen remarried a man by the name of John Hubbardt.

 

Mary Ellen and John Hubbardt moved with most of the family members to Oklahoma Territory where they homesteaded near Perry, Oklahoma sometime between 1896 & 1898. Nancy Josephine had married Henry Hamilton Carroll, September 13, 1888 in Scotland Co., Missouri. Henry and Nancy, after having been married about 8 years, and with four children, also came to Oklahoma. In Oklahoma, two more daughters were born: Mary Ellen and Lucinda Pearl. Then, after falling near the end of her eighth pregnancy, Nancy's injury brought on an untimely death.

Little is known of the details of the time, but Henry was faced with the responsibility of raising six children. However, in July of 1904, Henry, now 36, married:
 

ELIZA JANE RORABAUGH. She was about twenty years old at the time and a mere three years older than Henry's oldest son, Nate. The baby of the family was Lucinda, about three years old. It was about this time that Henry moved his family to Indian Territory near Drumright and to the section of land of which a portion remains today in family hands.

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 During the years from 1905 to 1917, seven children were born to Henry and Eliza Jane. Though most of the children were born at Drumright, the fifth and sixth children were born at Perry, Oklahoma. This indicates that Eliza possibly spent the latter part of each of these pregnancies with her mother, Mary Ellen, in Perry. Mary Ellen died on October 23, 1916 at Perry and was buried in Fairview Cemetery south of Perry.

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Tragedy came again to the Carroll household in December of 1920 when three year old infant, "Little Rose", died of sudden illness. Thirteen years later, 1933, twenty-five year old, Alta Susan, succumbed to appendicitis. The remaining children, however, were living at the time of Henry's death at 84 years of age in 1953. Eliza Jane died at Drumright, Oklahoma on May 3, 1966 and was buried beside Henry and Nancy at Quay Cemetery, also known as Lawson Cemetery near Yale, Oklahoma.

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My father, Woodrow Wilson Carroll, is also buried near his parents in Lawson Cemetery.  He married Ella Iola Lingle in 1938 and they had six children.  I was the 4th child, James Hamilton Carroll, born in Drumright, Oklahoma.

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