Dieterich Coover

Seventy-seven Palatine Immigrants, who, with their families, numbered in all 60 persons, arrived Aug 9, 1730 at Philadelphia, PA on the ship Thistle of Glasgow. Among those was Deiterich Kober. The male passengers of the ship, from ages 16 and upwards, proceeded at once to the court house and subscribed their names under oath to two declarations before the Governor of the Province of Pennsylvania. The first was the Oath of Allegiance and the second the Oath of Abjuration and Fidelity. The signature of Dieterich Kober is entered onto those two books.

Closely associated with him and his family was Ludwig Mohler, a prominent Swiss, who was born in Switzerland in the year 1696 came with his wife also on the ship thistle and stood side by side with Dieterich Kober as they two gave their signatures together on the Oaths of Allegiance and of Abjuration and late, after settling in Lancaster county, their children and grand children intermarried. There is an old family tradition, that Dietrich Kober was a Swiss, and the social relationship remained with the Mohler family in years subsequent to their arrival in Philadelphia seems to confirm the tradition.

John Dieterich Kober was born in 1703 somewhere in Germany or Switzerland, He died in 1791 and his original burial place is forgotten. One hundred and twenty-six years after his arrival in America and sixty-five years after his burial, his remains together with the remains of his wife Catharine, and of his son George and his wife, Elizabeth, were taken up in 1856 and reinterred in one grave in the Keller-Coover burial place, called “Barbace,” and The Coover Farm Cemetery, near Mechanicsburg, PA. https://www.kauffmanancestry.com/coover-farm-cemetery-reinternment-of-coovers/

John Dieterich Kober married Anna Catharina Hoffman, who died in 1782, nine years before the death of her husband.

John Dieterich Kober had a son, and a grandson, named Dieterich, and it is apparent that our forebear Dieterich in his later years used his baptismal praenomen, John, and his grand-children called him grandfather John.

The youngest son, of George Coover was named John after his grandfather. This grandson John married Salome Keller, daughter of Martin Keller. In 1856, six years before his own death, John Coover reinterred the remains of both his parents and grandparents in one grave, in the Keller-Coover cemetery, namely Barbace.

After the burial in Barbace in 1883 of Salome Keller Coover, who survived her husband 21 years, this “Barbace” cemetery was closed to all future interments.

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