A Sturmgewehr 44 in the closet

[gweimer]

Family name spellings were changed for many reasons.  My relatives were Dunkards, and they were known to change the spelling to distance themselves.  More often than not, it was a case of an illiterate clerk interpreting from someone who didn't speak English, so whatever got written down became their name.  I have one ancestor that showed up in 3 different censuses across a decade, under 3 different variations of the same name.
My family is technically French, from the Alsace-Lorraine area, which I believe was traded off between the French and Germans over the centuries.  We've traced our roots back to Langensoulzbach, in France.

[nofi]

my dad traced our family back seventeen generations in the bari italy area before hitting a dead end.

[gweimer]

my dad traced our family back seventeen generations in the bari italy area before hitting a dead end.

What my father managed to get went back to 1707.  You reach a point where you pretty much have to travel to the region and start looking through local records.  We've been told that we are descended from the royal family in Weimar, where there was supposed to be a small castle still left.  The problem is, as you already mentioned, no actual proof.  I do know that one of my ancestors, Jacob Wimer, is given a great deal of credit for the growth and development of SW Oregon (first post office, first hotel, land development).  I have a model of one of his grist mills in HO scale.  I really should see if Mark can put it together for me.  Jacob was a character, moving out of Keokuk, IA, where he caused a big stir by moving his boundary markers into Indian land across a river and then claiming they were liars.  Jacob was the brother of my g-g-g-g-grandfather(?), Valentine Weimer.

[Pilgrim]

My dad's family evidently came into Ellis Island in the late 1800's and that's as far back as we go on that side.  My Mom's family came out of Missouri, but there's not a lot of collective info about much beyond 1900. 

I cheerfully claim that I came from Sears via mail order.

[Lightyear]

I was surprised to read years ago that of all US immigrant groups the Germans were the largest, they just came pretty evenly over the centuries and not in waves like others. And they assimilated as opposed to forming ethnic hubs. Part of it has to do with the fact that Germany only evolved as a state late in the 19th century, there wasn't much of a national identity for the immigrants to fall back upon.

Come to the Texas hill country - there was huge wave of German and Czech immigrants after the civil war, if memory serves me correctly.  Generations later there are many people speaking the mother tongue or a variation thereof.

Speaking of German immigrants my first ancestor shows up in the 1790 census in the mountains of North Carolina.  This was evidently the frontier and the story goes, undocumented of course, that Henri was a Hessian mercenary as this was an area that many of the Hessian settled in after the revolutionary war.  Pretty much everyone with my surname seems to have descended from this one man.  Supposedly there are two or three family cemeteries full of my ancestors there somewhere.

My mother's family is British and the first family member here was the umpteenth son of some nobleman.  Every son after number one was SOL so they shipped the sons off to the colonies where they were given large swaths of land.  Seems this guys had property in the city where he had one wife and family and one wife in the "country" where he had another family.  They can find no legal marriage license for the country family so the entire branch is considered, laughingly, at family reunions as the bastard branch. 

I'm a mercenary bastard   Been called worse

[Dave W]

Come to the Texas hill country - there was huge wave of German and Czech immigrants after the civil war, if memory serves me correctly.  Generations later there are many people speaking the mother tongue or a variation thereof.

...

Not just in the hill country, even more in the small towns east of there but west of Houston.

Where else would you find a musician named Adolph Hofner who was actually 3/4 Czech and grew up in a Czech-speaking home and played Western Swing music.

The there are the Wendish of Lee County (east of Austin) and the Alsatians of Castroville and D'Hanis (west of San Antonio).

[Lightyear]

I travel somewhat regularly to Halletsville, about 25 miles south of Schulenberg, and the customer is a fairly large steel fabricator with several huge open air shops.  I work inside but when I visit all you hear playing on the radio is the local Polka channel   In Houston it's either Tejano or Country.  A big plus to this place is that every Friday morning they cook hotlinks, sausage for non locals, from a local butcher/packer.  The smell of garlic will make your hair curl    $1 a link with all the white bread, mustard, kraut you want.  Last time I was there they had some venison chili as well

[Pilgrim]

Texas definitely has its attractions! 

[patman]

My family is Czech ...came over when WWI broke out.  Coal miners, settled in eastern Ohio...

[Dave W]

I travel somewhat regularly to Halletsville, about 25 miles south of Schulenberg, and the customer is a fairly large steel fabricator with several huge open air shops.  I work inside but when I visit all you hear playing on the radio is the local Polka channel   In Houston it's either Tejano or Country.  A big plus to this place is that every Friday morning they cook hotlinks, sausage for non locals, from a local butcher/packer.  The smell of garlic will make your hair curl    $1 a link with all the white bread, mustard, kraut you want.  Last time I was there they had some venison chili as well

Don't forget kolaches (or kolackys, as they're spelled up here). Plenty of kolaches to be had in Schulenburg and Halletsville.

[Lightyear]

Yes indeed!  But a true kolache, in Texas anyway, is a flat, squarish pastry with a little fruit in a depression in the middle of it.  Most places around here call the ones that are bread dough baked around a sausage a kolache but truly it's called a pig in the blanket or, most often, a pig.  Some the best I've had are  at a place called Prasek's just south of El Campo on US 59

Damn, I'm hungry! And I just finished a plate of cheese enchilada's with my home made verde sauce!

[Dave W]

Right, a pig in a blanket isn't a real kolache (but still good).

Now I'm hungry too.