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Originally Seitz
Descendants of Sigizo; a pet form of names beginning with Sieg, (Victory), as Sigibald, Sigiheri and Sigmund. (from Dictionary of American Names by Elsdon C. Smith).
According to the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography V. 58, P. 352, the Seitz Family came from the upper Rhine region especially around the Black Forest area. Other references state the Senzheim, in the Palatinate, Germany, and from Switzerland. Until further study is made in Germany, this will do as these places are all in the same area, namely the very southwestern part of Germany touching the Swiss border.
Our ancestors came down the Rhine River to Rotterdam, Netherlands, the harbor from which the Palatines sailed for Philadelphia, stopping at the English ports of Deal or Cowes, before heading out to sea. The voyage was lengthy and filled with hardships. Many died on the way and many arrived sick, but they were hopeful of making a new home in a new land. After landing, they first found shelter in dugouts, hollow trees, hastily constructed huts or under rude tents under great trees.
By 1750, the number of Germans in Penn’s colony reached seventy or eighty thousand, nearly one half of the total population. Most of these settled in the Piedmont area of Philadelphia, Chester and Lancaster Counties. Then in the years between 1733 and 1736, fifty-two licenses were issued to settlers desiring to take up land west of the Susquehanna River along Codorus Creek. Most of these pioneers were German.
As early as 1732, Jost Hite (Heit) of Monocacy Valley of Maryland entered the Shenandoah Valley and realized that the way was open for German expansion southward. By 1735, he had established a prosperous German settlement on Cpequon Creek near the Bryan Quaker colony. At the same time, more than fifty German families were settled on nine Plantations in the southeastern part of present-day Rockingham County, Virginia. Winchester had German inhabitants as early as 1738; Woodstock by 1740.
The fundamental cause of German migration to the Carolina frontier was the increasing scarcity of desirable land in Pennsylvania. Then by 1750, favorable reports reached the Germans regarding the fertility and cheapness of land in the Granville district of North Carolina. They traveled to Carolina through the Shenandoah Valley on the Great Wagon Road which followed buffalo and Indian trails. Most of the pioneers settled East of the Catawba River about 1745-57, but even then a few of these hardy people had crossed the Catawba River at Sherrill’s or Beatty’s Fords into the land of the Catawba Indians. (Catawba is said to be an Indian word meaning “catfish” in which the river is said to have abounded.) Among these were Adam and Johann Henrich Seitz. The trip south to North Carolina was about 435 miles; Philadelphia, to Lancaster and York to Wenchester, thence up Shenandoah Valley crossing Fluvanna River at Loeney’s Ford, thence to Staunton River and down the river through the Blue Ridge, thence southward crossing Dan River below the mouth of Mayo River, thence still southward near Moravian settlement on Yadkin River, just above the mouth of Linville Creek and ten miles above Reedy Creek.