On October 5th 1737, Johannes Kistler arrived in Philadelphia aboard the bilander Townshend. The ship’s passengers were Palatines, German-speakers from the Rhineland who were seeking a better life in a new land. They had journeyed down the Rhine River and embarked from Amsterdam. After the ship docked, Johannes and the other adult male passengers went ashore to swear an oath of allegiance to the King of England and to have their arrival registered in accordance with provincial law. The illiterate Johannes took up a quill and scrawled his mark on the ship's registry in lieu of a signature.

Because of a lack of documentation, what happened just before and after Johannes Kistler’s arrival has been shrouded in mystery. Until relatively recently, the next known Kistler records were of births and christenings from Berks and Lehigh Counties, beginning in the 1750s. Presented with a paucity of facts, some early Kistler family historians made mistaken assumptions about who was related to whom and consequently got certain individuals mixed up. Unfortunately, those errors became memorialized in county histories and historical society articles and were literally etched in stone on grave markers and monuments, resulting in The Kistler Confusion. 

However, in recent decades a handful of researchers discovered important new information that exposed the errors and gave us a better idea of what most likely happened. As you will see, the new findings strongly suggest that the heads of the three main branches of the Kistler family in eastern Pennsylvania, namely Johannes (Hannes) Kistler of Albany Towship, John George Kistler of Lynn Township and (possibly) Johannes Niclaus Kistler of Tulpehocken, were the sons of the immigrant Johannes Kistler who seems to have disappeared soon after his arrival. Although ancestry web sites and family trees are beginning to incorporate some of this research, much misinformation persists.

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IMPORTANT NOTE regarding the naming convention used on this website: The similarity of the first names was one of the leading causes of the Kistler Confusion. The four main characters all had names containing some variant of the English "John." To avoid such confusion, I will refer to Johannes Kistler who signed the ship's register in 1737 as the Immigrant Johannes or simply Johannes. I will refer to his three sons as: 1. Hannes or Johannes (Hannes), 2. John George and 3. Johannes Niclaus or Niclaus.