Hi Peggy!
I'm still around, and am now retired at 69. I still have all my correspondence with the distant cousins from the 70s. I hope to include some of it in my
Parchman Family History Book, which I'm now working on.
I now have about 5000 documents and over 6000 names connected to my tree after 30 years and about 10,000 hours of work, but these include all 4 of my own grandparents' lines. The 2 brothers who went to
Tennessee have many more descendants with the name since thos lines had lots of sons. The
Perchment name died out with William (born 1925) after his son Patrick was adopted and took a new surname.
There are about 2000 descendants of Nicholas
Parchman in my tree, but I don't usually follow the lines of the daughters of each generation beyond their own children. Otherwise, I calculate there would be over a million descendants by my 8th generation, most without the Parchman/Perchment/Parchment name. (assuming 8 surviving children per generation to reproduce up to the 6th generation, which then drops to about 5 reproducing survivors by the 7th generation, and to 3 by the 8th generation) If I include my grandson's 10th generation (with only about 2 reproducing survivors per generation), there would be about 7 million descendants of Nicholas. Of course sometimes cousins married cousins, so the actual number would be smaller.
By the way, I have found 2 earlier documents for Nicholas. He was in George Washington's colonial militia in
Winchester, VA during the French and Indian War in 1758. In 1760, he signed as a witness for a deed in
Winchester. Some legends say he was in the
Fort Pitt area by 1763, but I have no evidence yet. The Indian depredations were still pretty bad in Western PA until after the Revolution, since the Quaker government signed a treaty with the Indians prohibiting white settlement until 1768.
I have searched hundreds of hours to connect him back to Germany to no avail. He is not on ANY ship's lists of immigrants. There were a number of Parchmanns in Westphalia in the late 1600s, and even a
Nicolas Parchmann in one record in the early 1700s, but no proofs of connections.
I traveled to Parchim in Mecklenburg in 1997, but there were no Parchmanns there. I have Parchmann marriage records from Mecklenburg for the late 1800s. According to the
German telephone directory, most Parchmans today live in an area between
Hamburg and Mecklenburg, although there are a few in
Berlin