We believe David and his family left Middleburg (on the island of Walcheren in the Dutch Republic) for Mannheim some time in 1651, based on transcribed baptismal records of his children as found in Mary and William Demarest's 1938 genealogy. David's first two children, Jean and David (referred to as David I, since he died in infancy, apparently) were baptised at Middleburg on April 14, 1645 and June 22, 1649 respectively, while David (David II) was baptised at Mannheim on December 24, 1651, locating the move some time earlier than that.

David moved to Middleburg, we believe, in company with other French and Dutch Calvinists, who were lured to Mannheim by the Elector of Mannheim, Karl Ludwig, who was at the time recruiting Calvinists to come to Mannheim for the economic benefit of the city, promoting the safety of Mannheim -- a double star-fortified city at the confluence of the Necker and the Rhine -- over other safe havens for Calvinists in the Low Countries, which were at the time destabilized by the last years of the Thirty Years' War. During David's tenure there, Mannheim's population swelled to some 10,000 people, most within the walls of the city itself.

Mary and William tell us that while there David reactivated a Calvinist house of worship called the Temple of Concord, which also admitted Lutherans.

Finally we are told that David and his family left Mannheim for Amsterdam -- presumably sailing down the Rhine -- to board the Bonte Coe for North America in April of 1663. David's time in Mannheim is thus bracketed between the baptism of David (II) in late 1651, and late 1662 or early 1663, as Marie (who sailed with David and Marie Sohier on the Bonte Coe) is listed in the 1938 genealogy as being baptised at Mannheim on May 19, 1662.

Matthus Merain's birds-eye engraving of Mannheim in 1695 gives a clear sense of the town -- and its impressive fortifications, natural and otherwise -- at the period of David's occupation. The town as seen in this illustration is relatively new, in two senses: Mannheim was chartered as a city in 1607, and was largely destroyed in 1622 by Catholic League forces at the beginning of the Thirty Years War, and was largely untended until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

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We have reason to believe that the Temple of Concord that David worked to reactivate was located roughly where the red square on the map indicates, since Stockwell's map of Mannheim from 1795-1800 (below) indicates that the Lutheran Temple (#43 in Stockwell's legend) was at that location at that time. Note that Stockwell's map is oriented quite differently from Merain's earlier map.

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