Diller Genealogy - Page 04

The following data is extracted from The Diller Family, By JL Ringwalt.

but without finding his name; and although this fact is not in itself of material importance, it forms a link in the chain of circumstances which has led me to believe that Caspar Diller was on e of the seven thousand refugees, mentioned by Rupp, who went to Germany from England, and if he selected as his new home Baden, in the lower portion of the Palatinate, such action would correspond with the fact that he was the father of Philip Adam Diller, progenitor of the New Holland and Hanover Dillers.

The Dillers of the Old World are evidently children of the great historic River Rhine; and a friend of mine who recently visited Holland, says the name is very common on the signs of that country, near the Rhine. One of the profes sors in the Heidelberg University, who is reputed to be a very eminent scholar, is named Diller. As the vicinity of Heidelberg (formerly in the Palatinate, but now in Baden) was the birthplace of Philip Adam Diller, son of the immigrant Caspar Diller (and probably the home of Caspar Diller himself for some time before Philip Adam Diller was born), the following brief references to the history of Heidelberg, extracted from an encyclopedia, throws an interesting light upon the position of affairs in that part of Germany for some years previous to Caspar Diller's emigration to the American colonies: "Heidelberg was plundered and partly ruined by Tilly in 1622, by Turenne in 1674, by Melae in 1688, and by Marshal de Lorges in 1693. These misfortunes led to its decline in political importance, which was finally completed by the residence of the electors being removed to Mannheim in 1719. It was united to Baden in 1802."

An eloquent resume of the characteristics and history of the region in which the Dillers of the olden time dwelt is contained in the address delivered by E. K. Martin, Esq., at the centennial celebration in New Holland, in 1876, from which I extract the following: "On two sides of the Rhine, nestling among the provinces of Bohemia and Baden, Alsace and Lorraine, its ancient territorial boundaries obliterated today from the he world, lies the garden of Europe, furrowed by valleys the fairest on the continent, on whose sunny slopes still dwell the happiest and most peaceful peasantry on the face of the earth, stretching backward to dikes of Holland, and forward to the Vosges of France, and the foothills of the Alps; on its right the womb from which issued the Saxon on his mission of civil liberty; upon its left the nation of sturdy traffickers, at whose knee England caught the mystic art that distinguished her in the markets of the world. Today is the brightest jewel in the crown of the German Empire. Bigoted its people may have been, but it was the stern bigotry which stepped into the breach with Luther when England was treating for terms at the Pontifical Court. It was the bigotry that bolstered the falling fortunes of Gustavus Adolphus, and bared its breast to the sanguinary cruelty

Source: The Diller Family, By JL Ringwalt

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