A Brief History of the Steeves

Updated Sep, 2015

Compiled by Philip Earle Steeves, CBEEFEB

The Steeves surname originated in the New World in what is now New Brunswick, Canada (originally part of Nova Scotia). The patriarch of the family is a native German named Heinrich Stief. The records in Germany give his full name as Johann Heinrich Stief, but he dropped the Johann name in the New World. It was common in Germany at the time to consider the second name to be the “called-by” name. In America, his first name was officially listed as Henry, although he signed his name Heinrich Stief. In German records, the last name was mostly spelled Stieff. By the nineteenth century, the surname had become Steeves or Steves. Dr Bütterlin in Münsingen has reviewed the two extant signatures of Heinrich Stief himself and he states that “the name is without doubt Stief.” As the progenitor of a line of descendants numbering in the hundreds of thousands, his name has gone down in history as he spelled it: Heinrich Stief.

During the eighteenth century, about 100,000 Germans from the Palatinate region emigrated to Pennsylvania. Colloquially known as Pennsylvania Dutch, they were German (Deutsch), not from the Netherlands. They were mostly Lutherans, some Anabaptists, Moravians and others. The Palatinate includes the area in the southwestern part of modern Germany near the Rhine River. Although German, it was occasionally overrun by the French, and it became a frequent victim of successive European wars. It was particularly hard hit in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and again in the War of the Palatinate (1688-1697). Heinrich Stief’s grandfather, also named Johann Heinrich Stieff, is the first Stieff on record in the town of Münsingen, and it is likely he was one of those induced to move there in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War in an official effort to repopulate the war-devastated area. There is evidence he originally came from Switzerland.

This Johann Heinrich Stieff, grandfather of the Heinrich who came to America, was a stocking-knitter. His first son, Augustin was a poor, illiterate herdsman. Augustin’s sons included the Heinrich Stief who emigrated to America. Heinrich was born in Sirchingen, a tiny village several Km northwest of Münsingen, in 1718. He listed his occupation as brickmaker. He married Regina Stahleker (or Stalegger) on 25 February 1745 in the Martinskirche (Church of St Martin),Münsingen, Germany. (This record was discovered by genealogist Les Bowser only in 1997—prior to that, no one had any valid idea where in Germany they hailed from.) They had three children by 1748—two daughters and a son. The first two children died quite young in Germany. After four years of marriage, Heinrich and Regina emigrated from Seissen, Germany with the only surviving daughter. They embarked at Rotterdam and landed in Philadelphia on 17 October 1749, (his signature was identified by Bowser in 1999 on the passenger list of the ship Fane). However, the child had evidently perished on the trans-Atlantic voyage, as indeed did many of the children on those extremely perilous trips. Only the hardiest individuals survived the ocean crossing, and on arrival in the New World, many were little more than walking skeletons. Even in the eighteenth century, new arrivals were closely inspected by medical officers and quarantined as necessary.

Heinrich and Regina then began a second family, producing seven sons, all born in Pennsylvania. The first was born only four weeks after arrival, so Regina was pregnant even before embarking upon the ocean voyage. Records have been found of the naturalization of both Henry Stief and Michael Lutz, and of the taking of the Lord's Supper Sacrament on 22 September 1765 within three months of the taking of the oath of allegiance to the Crown of England. It was a requirement to be a resident of the colony for seven years in order to be eligible for naturalization, but they did not take the oath at the first opportunity, instead waiting until the Fall before they moved on to Canada. They lived and farmed in Roxborough, about 12 miles north of Philadelphia,just east of the Schuylkill River and immediately west of Germantown which was the site of the first settlement of German immigrants late in the seventeenth century.

The Treaty of Paris that ended the French and Indian War (also called The Seven Years’ War in Europe) granted Britain what had been New France. The British renamed Acadia, calling it Nova Scotia. Those Acadians (francophone Catholics) who refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the British Crown were expelled by the British from south-eastern Nova Scotia in 1755. Great pressure was brought to bear to resettle the area with loyal Protestants. A grant for the land was given to four Philadelphia land companies. One company was headed by Benjamin Franklin, along with a friend and partner John Hughes. The company was poorly organized, as Benjamin Franklin was living in London, and John Hughes had accepted, unwisely it turned out, an appointment to administer the wildly unpopular Stamp Act in the American colonies. His life was unbearable and his mind would be on other things rather than following up on settlers in Canada, who wound up being largely left to their own devices.

The major motivating factor that stimulated the Palatines to emigrate to America was economic—not to achieve religious freedom or to flee from religious persecution. The simple fact was that there were too many people in the Old World and not enough land. Heinrich and his two brothers are known to have been sharing a single patch of land in Münsingen, a relatively barren hill,probably less than an acre! In Roxborough, they had more land to work, but probably not to own. So their dream of being allowed to live freely and farm their own land was not yet realized. This “land hunger” may have been exacerbated by the continued immigration of new families into the Philadelphia area, the growing unrest of the people in the colonies as the result of the domination of England over their lives, and the possibility of compulsory military service—all factors that may have contributed to the decision by Heinrich Stief and eight others to sign the historic Articles of Agreement. The plan was that private companies, including the one assembled by Benjamin Franklin and his partners, would provide transport to Nova Scotia, to a section later named New Brunswick, and would give each family certain land in an area vacated by the French. This was codified in the Articles of Agreement signed on 27 January 1766.

The group left Philadelphia on 26 or 27 April 1766, sailed on a one-masted sloop named the Lovey, and arrived at Hall’s Creek at the Bend of the Petitcodiac River (the eventual site of the city of Moncton) at 9:30 am on 3 June, the time cleverly calculated by Les Bowser related to the tides which are some of the highest in the world. Heinrich and Regina had lived in Pennsylvania for 16-½ years, and had borne there the seven sons from whom all Steeves trace their ancestry. Unlike their first attempt at a family—the three children born in Germany—these seven hardy sons all survived the shorter emigration to Canada and the first difficult years of existence there.

Although nine men of this German community originally signed the agreement to become settlers in Nova Scotia, only five original signers and their families actually sailed: Michael Lutz (Lutes), Mathias Summer (Sommer), Heinrich Stief, Jacob Treitz (Trites), and Charles Jones (ananglicized version of Carl Schantz, also a German, not a Welshman as he was later confused to be; this error is perpetuated on the plaque at the site). There were other families on the sloop, but the plaque placed in Moncton in June, 2000 lists eight men and their families, all of whom we now believe were originally from the Palatinate region of southwestern Germany. This plaque is at Hall’s Creek, the point where the Lovey discharged the first families in 1766. Note that these emigrants to Nova Scotia are called in Canada the pre-Loyalist immigrants, as distinguished from the subsequent Loyalist wave that occurred during and after the American Revolutionary War—colonists loyal to the Crown who found themselves no longer welcome in America.

The June arrival was somewhat late for planting crops for harvest that year, and a second sloop with supplies and food is traditionally thought to have been lost at sea. The first winter was very hard indeed. Legend has it they had little to eat except turnip mush. The land the settlers from Pennsylvania were granted turned out, in fact, not to be already cleared Acadian farmland; it was instead uncleared brush. The British had burned all pre-existing buildings. The Stiefs struggled to make a go of it there, and the Philadelphia company ultimately reneged on sending them the supplies they were expecting, so within three years they moved several miles downriver, where another settlement in the present town of Hillsborough was underway. Heinrich Stief, his wife and seven sons (the oldest, Jacob, not yet 17 years old at the time of the move to Canada), together with the other German settlers in the Hillsborough area, formed a band of perhaps 60 Germans in total.

By the time the Philadelphia land claimants arrived in June 1766, Acadians had already been given permission to return, two years earlier in 1764. There was considerable contention about the deeds, which prompted later lawsuits. Also in the Hillsborough area were some Acadians who had managed to evade the Expulsion. One family legend has it that one of the Acadians named Belliveau came to the aid of the Steeves. He taught them how to snare animals for food and furs, how to fish the river for Shepody shad and salmon, and how to make sugar from maple trees. He introduced them to the cow cabbage, goose tongue and samphire greens—flora that grew wild on the salt flats of the river. The Steeves must have been sturdy stock, for they all survived and multiplied. Even now they have a reputation for longevity. Esther Clark Wright, whose seminal book Samphire Greens represented the first modern investigation into the Steeves story, stated that Heinrich and Regina had 71 grandchildren—65 of whom married—and 526 great-grandchildren.By now their descendants number in the hundreds of thousands.

The 1770 census, to see if there were enough families to satisfy the land grant, lists Heinrich as Henry Steeves. A 1783 list has him as Henry Steeve. By the next generation, the surname was generally Steeves. Some descendants used the spelling Steves. The anglicization of names was common and may well have been welcome. From New Brunswick, Steeves descendants spread toNew England and many other states, across Canada, and around the world. Some Steeves movedback across the Atlantic to England, which has confused computer-produced, assembly-line family histories which generate erroneous claims to an old Steeves family line in Europe, but the nameclearly originated in the New World. Any internet site that purports to tell the origin of the Steevesfamily, and does not reference Heinrich Stief from Münsingen, is clearly bogus. Remarkably, thanks to genealogists Esther Clark Wright, Muriel Lutes Sikorski, Rainer Hempel and Les Bowser, and meticulous record-keeping in Western Europe, we now have some bits of the actual history of three generations of Stieffs in Münsingen, Germany, as well as a reference to the prior ancestor in Switzerland, together with much of the documented story of Heinrich and Regina Stief who came first to America where they bore and raised seven sons, then moved on finally to Nova Scotia where they flourished. Together they created the enduring legacy of hundreds of thousands of Steeves.

Sources:
 Esther Clark Wright, Samphire Greens, 1961
 Les Bowser, The Search for Heinrich Stief, 2001
 Claude Taylor, Brief Comments on the History of the Steeves Family, 24 Jul 1966
 Rainer L Hempel, New Voices on the Shores, 2000
 The Steeves Register (Steeves Family, inc)
 Les Bowser, Sailing from Philadelphia, in Generations, Journal of the New BrunswickGenealogical Society, Winter 2008; and other articles in the series
 Philip Earle Steeves, Heinrich and Regina, The Story of the First Steeves, 2014
 Various Internet sites


Printed with the permission of Philip Earle Steeves. Excerpted from Steeves250 website. 30 January 2016