The signature of "Nicklaus Röhrig" appears on the list of passengers arriving at Philadelphia on 21 Sep 1742, aboard the English ship "Francis and Elizabeth" (Captain George North), en route from Rotterdam with a stop at Deal in Kent. He was listed as a German; the list does not include ages nor the names of women and children. This is the only variation of the name appearing in the book "30,000 Names of Immigrants in Pennsylvania", so it is almost certainly the Nicholaus Rarigh who settled in Germantown, in Philadelphia Co., Pennsylvania. (In 1784 the northern part of Philadelphia Co., including Germantown, was split off to form Montgomery Co.)

Two years later (8 Oct 1744) the ship Aurora arrived in Philadelphia, also from Rotterdam, bearing passengers Conrad and John Heinrich Rörich, who also settled in Germantown. This Conrad has sometimes been erroneously identified as the father of Henry Rarick who married Catherine Summers, for example, as of this writing (May 1994), he is so attached in the LDS Ancestral File, based on a 1991 submission from Mrs. Brent Ossman, 15256 Hyacinth Place, Dumfries, VA 22026. But estate records of Montgomery Co., PA show this assumption to be false.

"Nickolaus Rerig" and "Anna Maria Jansen", were married in St. Michael's Zion Lutheran Church in Germantown, on 5 May 1747. Nickolaus was marked as "Reformed", and Anna Maria as a "Lutheran widow", age 24, daughter of Jan Jansen and Elizabeth Papen. (This marriage is in the LDS Ancestral File, from submission AF83-060427, by John F. Vallentine, 1981 S. 700 E, Springville, UT 84663. The couple is not linked to anyone else in the AF, and there are no other event dates on their individual records, so it was probably a general extraction of the Germantown Zion Lutheran Church marriage records.)

From "Sketches of Lower Salford" in the Bulletin of the Historical Society of Montgomery County (Pennsylvania) we read the following: "On January 19, 1748, John Johnson and his wife, Mary, granted to Nicholas Rary, a stocking weaver, of Germantown, seven acres and a quarter, of his best land.... Nicholas Rary then lived there and carried on the stocking weaving about twenty-seven years, and then died there intestate, leaving a widow and two sons, whose names were Henry and John. Letters of administration on his estate were granted to his widow, Mary, and son Henry. These administrators together with Henry's wife, Catherine, sold and confirmed the lot to his brother, John Rary, and gave conveyance dated February 1, 1776. John Rary owned this lot only two years, when he and his wife, Regina, confirmed the same property to Robert De Silver, on May 2, 1778..." The property was in the village of Harleysville, in Lower Salford township. At the time it was part of Philadelphia Co., and is now in Montgomery Co.

It was noted in the Goshenhoppen Church records that a Mr. Roerig was buried on October 7, 1775, and that he was born 1698, day unknown, aged about 77 years. It is not known when his wife, Anna Maria, died, except that it must have been after the 1776 estate sale. If the age and year of birth are correct, Nicklaus would have been 49 when he married Anna Maria Jansen, and thus may have had a prior marriage himself, perhaps in Germany. On the other hand, ages given at death by the deceased's relatives are often wrong by many years.

The IGI does not contain entries for any Nicklaus Roehrig (or variants) born in Germany within a dozen years of 1698. The closest entries are for Nikolaus Rorhig, b. 22 Nov 1713, in Ershausen, Eichsfeld, Sachsen, Preussen, son of Freidrich Rohrig and Barbara Mueller; and Johann Niclauss Roerich, christened 30 May 1714, in Evangelisch, Dierdorf, Rheinland, Preussen, son of Johan Anthon Roerich and Eva Catherina Scneiderss. (The LDS files use "oe" to represent "ö" and "ue" to represent "ü". The first place field in an extraction record is usually the name of the church. The marriages of the parents in the two births listed above are also in the IGI.)