Tracing Phillip Schaeffer and Elizabeth Schaeffer - II

Further research into Philip Schaeffer and Elizabeth Schaeffer has caused me to revise some of my conclusions in my earlier post on them. It seems likely that Schaeffer arrived in North America about August 1776 and certainly no later than October, and that he was posted to New York with the Hesse-Hanau Jaegers. Details of his military activities between 1776 and December 1779 are still to be researched, but I am pretty sure most of them will either be in the Hesse-Hanau Orderly Books and Letters aforementioned and in Johann Ewald's Diary of the American War. A Hessian Journal which I have yet to buy.

There is now much more clarity about Schaeffer's personal life. It is now reasonable to assume that Schaeffer married in New York some time between August 1776 and probably September or October 1778, which would place Elizabeth Schaeffer's birth somewhere around the middle of June 1779, making her about ten in 1789-90. As noted in the earlier post it is possible her mother was either English or an American Loyalist because of Elizabeth's bilingual skill in both English and German; or , if her mother was a German camp follower, she could have simply began to pick up English from growing up in New York between 1779 and 1783.

Lieutenant Schaeffer definitely took part in the South Carolina campaign of 1779-1780. He is mentioned by name several times during the 1780 siege of Charleston in both Letters and Diary of Captain John Ewald, and the Diary of Captain Johann Hindrich. After his service in the South he returned to New York where he was stationed in Brooklyn and later on Long Island. He almost certainly went to Quebec in Canada, arriving there on 15 September 1781. From about the 22nd of that month he served  at various posts along the St. Lawrence, though I have not yet fully researched his later Canadian service. Almost certainly, he had Elizabeth and his wife with him. We have evidence of women and children being on (and dying on) the transport ship Montague that took the Hessians to Quebec. It is likely he returned to England from Canada in 1783, where he settled with his  family. He did not return to Hanau. When Elizabeth's mother died*, Schaeffer decided to begin life afresh. Probably through influential contacts he had made in the British Army in North America, he gained an appointment as a convict supervisor in the recently founded convict colony at Port Jackson, New South Wales. With his poor English, no one could have been less suited to the task. In September 1789 he embarked with Elizabeth on the Guardian bound for Botany Bay, via Cape Town. 

*The Schaeffers must have been reasonably well off during their time in London. I have not been able to find any record of Elizabeth Schaeffer's illness or death in the various London records of the poor, assuming she shared the same first name as her daughter's.