The following narrative is extracted from J. Allan Ranck's 1978 publication, The Ranks of the Rancks. For the entire 66-page sketch (with photos), the reader is referred to the original which is available both on-line and in reprint.
"In 1641 in the middle of this period of relative calm created by the Edict of Nantes Jean Ranc, the Huguenot pastor from Paris, was born. We do not know the names of his parents nor the links which tie him to the Vibrac lineage. It is assumed that his roots were in that Languedoc soil. Nor do we know the name of his wife. Their only son was named Hans Valentine, a spelling which appears to reflect the transition from French to German through which the family moved in the succeeding troublesome decades. In France, the name would probably have been Jean Valentin.
"When in 1685 King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes and resumed the unbridled persecutions of Protestants, ordering all Huguenot clergymen to leave France in fourteen days, Rev. Jean Ranc, then forty-four years of age, fled with his family from Paris to escape the death which would undoubtedly have been their lot.
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"The Elector Frederick of the Palatinate successfully withstood the frequent efforts of the French to penetrate his province and established it as a refuge for the Protestant exiles. Mannheim, not yet a large city, because a Huguenot center and Jean Ranc no doubt continued his preaching there. Son Hans Valentine met in Mannheim and married Margaretha Philippes (Mafgarith Philipp) of French-Dutch descent. They had six children: Anna Barbara, John Michael, John Philip, Rosine Katharine, Susanna Margaretha and Johann Valentine born in 1699, 1701, 1704, 1705, 1707, and 1710 respectively. Hans Valentine died in 1710, leaving his young family in the care of their grandfather. Only two years later Rev. Jean Ranc also died. Rosine Katharine and Johann Valentine died in childhood. The remaining four children, left with their mother, grew to young adulthood in Mannheim. Our family story continues with the lives of the two brothers, John Michael and John Philip. Of their mother and the other children we have no further knowledge, except that on 26 February 1725 Susanna Margaretha married Johann Valentin Weinkraus." [In 1996, it was discovered that Christian Schneder, his wife Susanna Margaretha (Ranck), and their daughter Margaret arrived in Philadelphia September 11,1729 aboard the ship Allen, settled originally in Weaverland and later re-settled on 133 acres purchased from Penn's sons south of present Terre Hill.]
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"In the spring of 1728 in Mannheim John Michael and John Philip Ranck learned that a band of Moravians was sailing down the Rhine past Mannheim for the purpose of embarking from Rotterdam for America. The young men sent a message ahead, begging the travellers to stop and take them on as additional passengers. Soon John Michael with his young wife Anna Barbara Schwab and John Philip were journeying down the Rhine to Holland.
"On June 5, 1728, John Michael and Anna Barbara, with two hundred and three other emigrants, set sail from Rotterdam for America on the English vessel, The Mortonhouse. ... After Eighty-one days of rough ocean voyage, crowded in the dismal hold of the ship, they arrived in Philadelphia on August 24, 1728.
"Strangely enough, brother John Philip was not on that passenger list. He waited in Rotterdam another year, sailing on June 20, 1729, on the very same vessel, The Mortonhouse. He arrived in Philadelphia on August 19, 1729, after a voyage of fifty-five days. No one knows for sure why both young men did not come at the same time. Romance may have been at stake, since this year later John Philip brought with him a young bride, Anna Barbara Schumacher. Perhaps there was a rule that only married couples would be give passage. Or was the ship list over-crowded because of the unexpected passengers picked up at Mannheim and was John Philip the one for whom there was no room? Or did he not have the necessary fare?
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"When John Michael and Anna Barbara Ranck arrived in Pennsylvania they were allotted a tract of land in Earl Township, Lancaster County, of seven or eight hundred acres. The proprietary right to Pennsylvania, at William Penn's death in 1718, had passed to his widow. When she died in 1733 it became the property of their three sons so that the formal deeds which were secured in 1742 and 1757 were signed by Thomas Penn.
"A year later, John Philip and his bride were given about two hundred and forty-three acres adjacent to the east; titles were granted to them in 1734 and 1751. These two farms, having been divided by 1978 into about twelve smaller farms, lie just southeast of New Holland, extending eastward past Blue Ball and East Earl to a tiny community called Fetterville, between Pennsylvania State Route #23 and the Welsh Mountains.
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"They were arriving just at the time -- 1729 -- when Lancaster County was being legally established and divided into seventeen townships. The town of New Holland was coming to birth at the same time. The first settler in this previously uninhabited valley was Hans Graaf who had first come from Switzerland to the Pequea Valley. One day following in search of his straying horses he came upon the Earl Township area and was so enthralled by its beauty that he purchased eleven hundred and fifty acres and moved there, calling it Graaf's Thal, now Groffdale. Other settlers followed rapidly. Another settlement arose farther east called Weber's Thal, now Weaverland. In 1728 John Diffenderfer became the first settler in what is now New Holland. He called it first by the intriguing if not too delicate name of Saue Schwamm, Hog Swamp. ... By the time of the Revolutionary War it had become New Holland out of respect for the land from which most of the settlers had set sail for the New World after a temporary safe haven there.
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"Nature itself treated these new colonists harshly, we are told. Frank R. Diffenderffer, in The Three Earls [New Holland, Ranck and Sandoe, 1876], catalogues the following hardships: a plague of locusts in 1732; an earthquake in 1737; prostrating heat in the summer of 1738; bitter winters of 1740 and 1741; a drought from 1753 to 1755; and the famous "Hard Winter" of 1780 when ice on the ponds became twenty inches thick!
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"These new citizens had an inherent respect for authority and their loyalty oath so recently taken meant much to them. Furthermore, the liberal government set up by William Penn had saved them some of the more offensive burdens of the Massachusetts colony. Nevertheless, when the call to arms came, members of the Ranck family joined their countrymen in the War for Independence. The names of nine Rancks are listed in the Colonial Army rosters -- Ludwig, John, Jacob, Valentine, Samuel, Michael, Philip, Adam and George. Samuel, one of the sons of John Michael, joined the First Battalion of the Flying Cloud of Pennsylvania in 1776. He is reported to have been with General Washington's forces which crossed the Delaware on Christmas Eve of that year, routing the Hessian troops at Trenton. Later he assisted in delivering Hessian prisoners from Lancaster to Philadelphia. His sister Mary spent some time in Bethlehem nursing wounded soldiers. She is said to have helped sew the crimson banner given to Count Pulaski, the Polish hero who had come to help the Americans win their freedom.
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"In their first years these ancestors were without the comfort and support of the church or school in their immediate neighborhoods. On occasion John Michael took his young family to the Moravian congregation at Warwick (Lititz) where several of the children were baptized and received into the various choirs (classes) of the congregation. John Philip associated himself with Zeltenreich's Reformed Church five miles to the southwest. At the first Reformed Coetus held in Philadelphia in 1747 Zeltenreich's was represented by Rev. John Bartholomew and Elder Philip Ranck. The records of Trinity Lutheran Church in New Holland also contain evidence of some ministerial acts performed there for members of the family.
"Occasionally also the families travelled the longer distance to Bethlehem where a larger colony of Moravians had been established. There, for instance, the church marriage records of 1758 report the wedding of Michael Rancke, "a farmer from Pennsylvania", to Elizabeth Leinbach of Oley. The also Anna Maria Rancke, grand-daughter of John Michael, found her husband in a quite unusual way. The Moravians frequently arranged the marriages of their young people by the drawing of lots. This was done sometimes so as to prevent long courtships from delaying the marriages of young people who were to be sent out as missionaries to the Indians. The evangelization of the Indians was one of the chief purposes of the Moravian colonists and must not be delayed. The records of the Moravian Historical Society tell the quaint story of the marriage of Anna Maria.
"In the fall of 1880, (John Peter) Kluge and a companion, Abraham Luckenbach from Bethlehem, received and accepted a call for service in the White River (Indiana) Mission. Both men were single, but Kluge expressed his willingness to be married, if the Lord would provide a suitable helpmate. Those were the days when the Brethren made considerable use of the lot. The names of all eligible young women in the Bethlehem congregation -- needless to say without their knowledge -- were therefore taken under prayerful consideration and submitted to lot. In each case the answer was negative.
"Thereupon the elders of the Nazareth congregation were fraternally requested to send a list of likely candidates for married honors. They did this, but Kluge's wife was not among the number. Not in Bethlehem, nor in Nazareth, but in Lititz, she had her home. Thus it came about that Brother Kluge journeyed to that village in the early part of October and was there joined in marriage to Anna Maria Rancke. On the twelfth day of the same month, the day on which her husband and Brother Abraham Luckenbach were ordained to the diaconate of the Moravian Church at Bethlehem, the young bride was accepted as an acolyte. October 15th, at high noon, the missionaries started on their journey from Bethlehem to Goshen." [Stocher, Harry E., History of the Moravian Missions Among the Indians on the White River in Indiana, Transactions of the Moravian Historical Society, Vol. X.]
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"The Great Awakening began to sweep across the new territories. It was fed by the evangelical preaching of George Whitefield, John Wesley, Martin Boehm, Philip Otterbein and others. Prayer services sprang up in people's homes. Preaching services were often conducted in barns, large church buildings being lacking. Long's Barn near Lititz was the site of some of the se "great meetings." John Michael Ranck and his family participated in those evangelical services. At one of the meetings, on Whitsuntide in 1767, Dr. Philip William Otterbein, a scholarly German Reformed pastor and teacher from Dillenberg, Germany, heard the moving sermon of the Mennonite Martin Boehm from the Palatinate. Dr. Otterbein was so inspired by the heartfelt sermon that at its conclusion he embraced Mr. Boehm, saying, "Wir sind bruder." There began a relationship with these two very different personalities and with other preachers, which thirty years later eventuated in the formation of The Church of the United Brethren in Christ.
"In addition to the Ranck family, the Long's Barn meetings were attended by the family of Valentine Grosh, a Moravian who may also have come to America when the Rancks did. Family acquaintance led to the marriage in 1769 of John Michael's daughter Mary to Valentine's son Christopher. For several years this young couple lived at Lititz but shortly they moved to a part of John Michael's farm near New Holland, when he divided it between his two sons Samuel and Valentine and his daughter Mary.
"In the home of Christopher and Mary Grosh religious services were held for twenty-seven years in a large room prepared for that purpose on the second floor. The first occasion was a preaching service conducted there in 1802 by Christian Newcomer, the famed itinerant preacher from Maryland, who had been born in Bareville, Pennsylvania. Christopher Grosh himself is listed as a preacher among the United Brethren people from 1789 until his death in 1829. The services were continued in the same place for fifteen more years when at Christopher Grosh's death the farm passed on to the daughter Elizabeth and her husband, Daniel Weidman. After forty-two years of worship in this Christian home, the congregation in 1844 was determined to build itself a church and Ranck's Church was born.
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" The fertile Earl and East Earl Township valley, comfortable refuge though it was for this immigrant family, was not large enough to provide homes for long for the constantly growing households. Records now [1978] identify twenty sons and daughters in the second generation, thirty-two in the third, and one hundred two in the fourth. Obviously homes had to be sought elsewhere, for even the thousand acres of the original two farms could only be subdivided a limited number of times. Some of the young people stayed within the county, making homes for themselves in Lancaster, Strasburg, Leola and other neighboring communities. Some settled in nearer counties of the state such as Lebanon and Berks and counties farther west. Still others set out on longer journeys across state boundaries to Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio and Indiana. One fourth-generation descendant, Peter Ranck, became a Mormon and made the arduous trip west through Nauvoo, Illinois, Council Bluffs, Iowa, Winter Quarters, Nebraska, to Salt Lake City, Utah. Through him a major branch of the family was established in the West. In all of these places yet today one finds groups of descendants of those early forebears, for whom Earl Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania was only the first haven in this immense land we now call the United States of America."
For the entire 66-page (with photos) section of The Ranks of the Rancks from which the above was extracted, the reader is referred to the original which is available both on-line and in reprint.