Am trying to discover information about a family living in Ohmden in the
early 1800s. The particulars are as follows:

The oldest generation was composed of Johann Georg Friedrich Sigel
(Siegel) and Eva Maria Behringer, >from Ohmden.
The next generation was Maria Dorothea Sigel (or Siegel), 1809-1890, and
Jakob Schaeufele, (later changed to Schiefly),
1808-1864. They were married in 1835 in Ohmden.
Their oldest child, John Schiefly (1836-1920), and his sister, Lucy Ann
Schiefly, lived in America after 1848.

Any help in finding additional information, or the location of records
about these families, would be greatly appreciated.

Amoz Chernoff JewishGen #31258

Amoz:
Are you implying that these people were Jewish? With given names like
those, it's hardly likely.

Ohmden's Lutheran church records are available via LDS. They span almost
400 years.

Roger Lustig Princeton, NJ USA research coordinator, GerSIG

Moderator note: Discussion of Stan's points will be limited in the list.
Please reply directly to stan.dub@gmail.com. You can send a CC to the
Forum for consideration. MOD 1 ============>

The posting >from Amos Chernoff about SIEGAL prompts me
to write, though probably the information in my posting will be well
known to many JewishGen members....

1) In past posts I've learned that many Jews in Germany and other
parts of Europe did not use family names until forced to do so by law,
or perhaps when it became convenient for other reasons. This (legal
requirement) occurred in at least one part of Germany around 1820.
Thus in researching German genealogy records relating to Sophia
Einstein Sulzberger (1811-1887) I found a family page >from Taenzer
listing her maternal grandfather's name as Solomon Joseph (but
presumably his full name then was actually Solomon ben Joseph) and on
the marriage record of Sophia Einstein to Abraham Sulzberger around
1835, her maternal grandfather was listed as Solomon Gutman. So
presumably Solomon ben Joseph adopted the famiily name Gutman between
1811 and 1835. If so, it would be wrong to conclude >from the page in
Taenzer that his name was Solomon Joseph, and that "Joseph" was his
family name.

2) Recently I discovered the tombstone of my great-grandfather at the
town of my mother's birthplace in Subcarpathian Ruthenia. He died in
1925. His name was Tzvi GROSSMAN, but his tombstone does not list the
name Grossman anywhere. He is described on the tombstone as Tzvi ben
Chaim Yehudi SIEGAL. The tombstone shows the large pitcher which is
the symbol of a Levi (washers of the priest's feet), and the word
SIEGAL is the way tombstones additionally described that the deceased
had been a Levi.

I am left wondering whether some of the people researching ancestors
named SIEGAL are actually descended >from a person who didn't use that
as a name, and instead are finding people who did not use a family
name at all, or might even have been a part of a family that later
adopted a different family name, but were associated with the word
"SIEGAL" only because they were Levis.

Stan Dub, Cleveland, Ohio stan.dub@gmail.com