German-American Names

I'm a 6th generation, 100% ancestry German American (both sides of my family) who lives in a region heavily populated with German surnames and Christian names. I found this book by chance in our local library and wow! It opened up the origins of my family names and also made sense of the names of other persons I've known and seen throughout the region all my life. There were surprising revelations to me, such as names that I never thought of as being of German origin or surnames taken from Latin, pre-Germanic/Celtic words and place names, and other languages. This book was fun just to skip through, but the introduction is worth reading if one has more time. I highly recommend this book if you are interested in your roots or just enjoy knowing where names come from and what they mean.

Lots of great information to support the research I was doing. It aided me in compilation of a family documentary.

Like everyone else, I fantasized that my distant ancestors were noble lords, wise sages, shrewd merchants and so on. However, I have found that while all of the other German surnamed families with familial links to my German surnamed family have some form of an acknowledged coat of arms, my German surname apparently does not. Apparently, my ancestors were the cooks and chefs that kept everyone else well-fed. Oh well, back to putting the icing on the cake.....

This wonderful little book is the product of Dr. George Fenwick Jones's lifelong interest in German names. The beginning of the book is a history of German names, including what happened to them in America. After that, the book goes into a lengthy alphabetical list of surnames that points back to appropriate paragraph in the earlier chapters, explaining where it came from. Overall, I found this to be a very interesting resource. If you are interested in genealogy, or just want to know a little bit about your names, then this is a good book for you to get. I highly recommend it!