John T. Struble - Ancestry

Ancestry

John T. Struble's great-grandfather, Dietrich Struble (1714–1807), was the progenitor of the Struble family in America. After Dietrich and his wife Elizabeth emigrated from Albig bei Alzey, Germany they tarried for a time in Holland until arranging a relationship of intentured servitude with William Allen (loyalist) of Allentown PA fame. Allen paid the family's passage on the ship, Edinburgh, which landed at Philadelphia in 1748. After working as a stonemason to pay off his indentured debt, Dietrich moved to German Valley, New Jersey (now Long Valley). There he purchased over time from Allen a 310-acre (1.3 km2) farm where he and Elizabeth raised their large family. About 1777, however, in order to escape their predominantly loyalist neighbors and more safely support the American Revolution, the Strubles sold the farm and moved some 30 miles (48 km) north to Sussex County, NJ.

The Struble children numbered ten sons, of which nine lived to adulthood and married. From this patriarchate, most Strubles in the United States trace their lineage. One of Dietrich's boys, Daniel, served under General Washington at Morristown. Another, John (who is alleged by one biographer to have been born during the Atlantic voyage), begot Isaac Struble, and it was he, Isaac the Elder (1801–1891), who led his family on a migration in stages – to more than one location in Virginia (including the future state of West Virginia) beginning in 1839, thence to Knox County, Ohio in 1846, and in 1857 (though with John T. blazing the trail in 1852) to Johnson County, Iowa. Three of Isaac’s twelve children (John T., George R. & Isaac the Younger) were destined to play important roles in the early polity and economy of Iowa.