In 1743, Georg Christoph (“Christopher”) Schoch made the bold and dangerous decision to leave the small Rhine RIver Valley village where his family had resided for generations and journey to William Penn’s Province of Pennsylvania in America. I have spent more than two decades tracing the 300-year, ten-generation odyssey from that village.
With that fateful decision, Christopher Schoch began an epic, multi-generation migration involving hundreds of his descendants. Christopher Schoch first settled in Berks County, Pennsylvania, where the subsequent generations of this Schoch family remained uninterrupted for more than 100 years, and where some descendants remain to this day. As the United States was undergoing its nineteenth-century westward expansion, a branch of the Berks County Schochs, led by another adventuresome patriarch, John M. Schoch, began another epic chapter migratory movement across the upper Midwest to the frontier territories of Missouri and Iowa. I am descended from that family.
This site is intended to share my research and hope that others do the same. I have connected with many direct descendants of this Schoch family through my research. The sharing of research, data, photos, notes and other information among this network has been invaluable in constructing this history. It is my hope that with the creation of this site, more connections among descendants and more available information will only enrich this story.
I have authored two books and a published historical research paper as I’ve followed along this path, which I am including here for your perusal. One, “Immigrant’s Legacy” is the culmination of those two decades of work and attempts to tell the complete 300+ year story. The other two publications were research which I felt were necessary to untangle parts of the story which required primary research to provide clarity. I hope you find these all interesting, useful and/or entertaining.