This family group on "Our Garst Family"7, pp.15-16.

Christening p. 10B (see Notes for his father), as Johan Nicolaus s/o Theobald Gerst and his wife Magdalena.

Johan Nicolaus arrived in Philadelphia 27 Sep 1749 on the ship “Isaac” with his wife, and settled near Jonestown, Bethel twp, Lancaster Co., on Little Swatara creek.

The maiden name of Johann Nicolas Gerst's wife is often seen as “Statthalter (?)”, or sometimes even without the question mark. Researchers for many years have been skeptical of the attribution, since no primary source was given. But most have passed it around with the annotation anyway, just in case the source somehow later turned up.

Dwayne Wrightsman has tracked down the source8 of this error as being DAR applications for descendants of Abraham Garst. These DAR applications listed the parents of Abraham Garst as being a Dewalt Garst and Mary Elizabeth Statthalter who were said to have arrived on the ship Patience in 1750. There are many errors in such a claim, including the facts that Abraham’s father was named Johan Nicolaus, not Dewalt, that the immigrant Theobald (Dewalt) Garst was Abraham’s grandfather, rather than his father, and that Theobald’s wife was Magdalena Catharina Bück, not Mary Elizabeth. But when Mary Miller Frost and Earl C. Frost were writing their 1938 book The Peffley Family in America, they assumed that the DAR review process was sufficient to guarantee that any data on approved applications was correct. From the Peffley book, the error spread into many later published genealogies.

The Wrightsman article does not list which descendants of Abraham had submitted the DAR applications. His source was a letter from Mary Miller Frost dated 1936, and she mentioned only the contents of the applications, not who they were submitted by. If the rest of the data from the application were correct, for example, if the DAR applicants had listed the parents of Abraham as Johan Nicolaus and Mary Elizabeth Statthalter, and Johan’s parents as Theobald (Dewalt) Gerst and wife Magdalena Catherina who arrived on the ship Patience, then it would be reasonable to conjecture that perhaps one of the applicants had found some German marriage record, and thus that the Statthalter might still be correct. But given the number of other known errors that were “approved”, it doesn’t seem likely that the maiden name came from any reliable source.

Perhaps someday a marriage record for Johan Nicolaus and Mary Elizabeth will yet turn up in German sources.