#52Ancestors: Anna Margaretha “Margaret” Preiss (1718-1784)

Headstone erected posthumously for Margaret Price.

This week, I begin my journey participating in Amy Johnson Crow’s “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks” family history blogging challenge.

The challenge: have one blog post each week devoted to a specific ancestor. It could be a story, a biography, a photograph, an outline of a research problem — anything that focuses on one ancestor.

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My first contribution to the challenge is from my husband’s family tree — the first female ancestor on his Preiss line (sometimes Americanized to “Price”) to immigrate to America — his 7th great grandmother Anna Margaretha “Margaret” Preiss [Price]. I have done almost no research on this particular ancestor, because a) I tend to spend more time on my family lines, and b) the descendants of Margaret Preiss and her husband Johan “John” Philip Harless [Harlas] have been heavily documented (and published) by other family historians.

Margaret was reportedly born in 1718 in Offenbach, Germany. She reportedly married John Philip Harless in 1738, also in Offenbach, and immigrated with him to Pennsylvania that same year. They had seven children together. Margaret reportedly died in 1784 in Christiansburg, Montgomery, Virginia. She is interred in what is now called Harless Cemetery, in Blacksburg, Montgomery County, Virginia with her husband, their second oldest son, and that son’s wife.

 Sources Cited

Find A Grave. (2006, May 9). John Phillip Harless, Sr. Retrieved from http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=14235076

Pritchard, J. L. R. (1962). Harless genealogy, John Philip and Anna Margaretha (Preiss) Harless: pioneers in western Virginia and some of their descendents (ebook.).