One family, two sides.

By the time the American colonies declared independence, the Windemuth family had already crossed an ocean and established new lives. Its members did not all agree about the new country they were living in.

A tailor named Johann Christopher

Johann Christopher Windemuth, also found as Wintermute, was born in 1676 according to a family-organization compilation and worked as a tailor. That account says he arrived in Philadelphia in 1736 aboard the Harle, traveling with his wife and sons. His recorded age was about sixty: an older immigrant beginning again late in life.

Some of his descendants remained near the Pennsylvania–New Jersey settlements. Through Johann Georg Windemuth, the family pedigree continues to Mary Margaret Wintermute, Morris Crater and their daughter Catharine Crater. Catharine married Jacob Welsh, whose daughter Dorothy became an ancestor of Margaretta Craig and Donald Melick.

Independence was a choice, not a consensus

The compilation reports that Frederick Snover, a grandson through Johann Christopher's daughter Anna, fought for the American cause. It also says that Johann Christopher's son Philip was a Loyalist who moved to Ontario after the war, and that five of Philip's sons served with Butler's Rangers, a Loyalist regiment.

These claims reveal a powerful possibility: members of the same extended immigrant family found themselves aligned with opposing sides. Family ties stretched across the emerging border between the United States and British North America. The choices would shape where people could safely live, what property they retained and which communities their descendants called home.

But the published family extract is brief. It does not provide individual military service records in the excerpt, and the exact number of sons enrolled has not been independently verified here. We should not assign particular battles, motives, losses or acts of violence to them without those records.

The branch that leads to Don

The immediate path to Donald is not through the reported Loyalist sons. It follows Johann Georg Windemuth → Mary Margaret Wintermute → Catharine Crater → Dorothy Welsh → Margaretta Craig, before reaching Walter Cameron Melick and his descendants. The opposing Revolutionary allegiances belong to related branches of the family, not to all of these direct ancestors.

That distinction does not make the story smaller. It shows how little a modern surname or nationality can tell us about what relatives thought in 1776. Family histories preserve the people who stayed, the people who left, and sometimes the disagreement between them.