Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: Treize69 on January 17, 2009, 10:32:55 PM
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Have any of you ever heard of the name (or a place named) von Schlieren?
in reasearching my family history, I have found a marriage record for my Great-Great Grandparents, showing the marriage of Daniel Romann and "Elizabeth Frei (abbreviation for freiherren?) von Schlieren", who was supposedly either northern Swiss or Bavarian (my family is Swiss). One of their sons (there were at least three who emigrated to the US and ended up in the same area) is, of course, my Great Grandfather, who emigrated to the US in the late 1860s and married into an established German-American family and started the brood that became my family. :)
But we can find noone else, either in later period records or in modern name searches, with the name von Schlieren. The only things or places I can find named Schlieren are the photography process (which is named for the way the pics look, not an inventor) and a place northwest of Zurich (which is, incidentally, where they lived before they emigrated) named Schlieren. But I can't find any history or info on the place online to research.
Can anyone help?
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never heard that name in Germany. Searchen the i-net I only found this town in Swizerland you also found.
Maybe contact the people from this site. Maybe they can help you?
http://www.swissgenealogie.ch/index.html
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what SirFrancis said, maybe thats a start,
actually i live 30km north from Zürich on the german side, i moved here 2003, sorry cant help, didnt hear that name
before.
R
Gh0stFT
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Name change maybe? My great grandparents had apparently been born into the name "MackMahon" (exactly like that) and by the time my grandmother was a teenager, it was either "MacMahon" or "McMahon"
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I'm starting to wonder if it wasn't a notation on where she was from, not a name. I can find Swiss people, places and businesses with my last name (including a gas amd electric works, and a psychiatrist in Zurich), but not hers.
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Familynames added with a "von" or "van" (dutch) declare where this person is from. Way back in the past, some people got their name from where they came, because lastnames were not a normal part of the whole name. So, expl. "Bernhard von München" was Bernhard who came from Munich. Thats how the people called him to identify him. Other lastnames declare the profession. Like "Meier" or "Müller".
So in your case, "xxx von Schlieren" might mean, "xxx" came from the town Schlieren. You might consider, that people from Europe moving to the USA sometimes changed their names (for what ever reason). But I don`t know how often this happened...
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The document states "Elizabeth Frei von Schlieren", which we assumed was "Elizabeth von Schlieren". I'm wondering now if its now actually the name "Elizabeth Frei" with the notation "from Schlieren". Its not far from Zurich, and thats where my family came from (and relatives still reside apparently), so that line of thinking is starting to make sense.
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look here: http://www.archive.org/stream/listswissemigrant01fausrich/listswissemigrant01fausrich_djvu.txt (search for the word Schlieren)
there is also a women named Elizabeth (Frey)....
maybe this can help as well:
http://www.ejourney.com/~bfrei/frei.html
or this
http://users.moscow.com/2IDcrawfords/genlinks.html
or this
http://www.ancestry.com/facts/frei-places-origin.ashx
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With that avatar, are you Bavarian? (probably stupid question)
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yes, Bavarian
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The document states "Elizabeth Frei von Schlieren", which we assumed was "Elizabeth von Schlieren". I'm wondering now if its now actually the name "Elizabeth Frei" with the notation "from Schlieren". Its not far from Zurich, and thats where my family came from (and relatives still reside apparently), so that line of thinking is starting to make sense.
Frei (Frey) is a very common name from my home town -- which was originally settled by Swiss. Think you are on the right track.
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Hmm, maybe I'm related to Royal Frey. Might be an interesting coincidence, that. :confused:
(http://www.geocities.com/pentagon/quarters/6940/frey1_2.jpg)
(http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2153/1537803473_ac6c9b1300.jpg?v=0)
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My suggestion would be to go over to Baens Bar (http://bar.baen.com/Default.aspx) and PM Virginia DeMarce (http://bar.baen.com/Users/Profile.aspx?id=11f1f13a-192b-4f15-b5c9-5c17b37c7487)
She it the author that is writing the Bavarian sector of the 1632 novel cycle. She is also deep in to German genealogy.
Just a thought,
Kevin
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Hey Treize69,
Von Schlieren actually refers to the place and not the name, Elizabeth as the first name and Frei as the last name, quiet a common swiss last name by the way which just translates to "free". Schlieren is the northwest part of Zurich. In old documents they used this connotation to describe where a person was born or grew up/lived in.
Cheers
Vipes
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Hey Treize69,
Von Schlieren actually refers to the place and not the name, Elizabeth as the first name and Frei as the last name, quiet a common swiss last name by the way which just translates to "free". Schlieren is the northwest part of Zurich. In old documents they used this connotation to describe where a person was born or grew up/lived in.
Cheers
Vipes
Since you live in Zurich (or at least thats what the forum says), just how many things and people around there are named "Romann"? I entered the original spelling of my last name into google earth to see if maybe it was a town and it came up with those little red pointers all over Zurich. Businesses, buildings, and people (like a psychiatrist).
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All sorts of people have the last name romann m8, lots of business etc but I have no idea how many there are :)
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At least they're still around. :)
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The other thing to consider is that upon arrival (especially later,after Ellis Island had been built) it was extremely hit or miss as to if the registering person actually got the name right in the first place!
If the person who registered them upon arrival spoke German, you were in luck! Most of the information got transferred properly. If not, all kinds of mistakes could have been made. Remember, most folks only had an 8th grade education back then, at BEST! If they did not speak the language, there could easily be confusion.
About 15% or so (a decent guess) of Americans today are walking around with a name that their ancestors didn't come here with.
Sometimes at the point of entry, a person would be asked "Where are you from?" and the answer would be misconstrued as their last name.
The German/Austrian/Swiss folks on the forum can fill you in better on the Freiherr/Freiherrin thing. It's been a source of debate amongst decendants over here. We were always told that it was a title of nobility given by kings, princes, and kaisers, with different levels of nobility inferred by either a small "v" or capital V"...but again there is debate on that.
Good luck in your geneology search!
ROX
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We thought for a while that it was a title too, but seeing as how their sons who came over here (there were at least three) were a dairy farmer, a mill worker and a day laborer, we kind of doubt that now. The last name thing makes more sense looking at the evidence.
We always knew from the older members of the family that the name was spelled differently back in Switzerland, but we weren't sure how it was spelled (Rohman, Rohmann, Romann, etc.) until we started finding old census records where they (my branch at least) still spelled it "Romann". They dropped the second "n" some time before WWI, and it's been "Roman" ever since. My Great Aunt (the first daughter of the one who immigrated) couldn't remember for positive where he was from (but she was pretty sure it was Zurich, and it turns out she was right) but she always maintained that it should be spelled with two "N"s (even though she herself spelled it with one) and was sure we were German-Swiss (as opposed to French or Italian) since she remembered her parents and grandparents speaking German to each other when she was little and that her father had a thick German accent until he died in 1946. Her mother was a first-generation German-American, but she was killed in an accident in 1917 along with their youngest daughter, so any info she might have had on her side of the family was lost almost a century ago.
The most confusing part of researching the family is the names. The two brothers who immigrated that I know for sure their names were Henry (my Great-Great-Grandfather) and Adolph, but I forget the third ones given name. And its Henry on his immigration records and passenger manifest, and thats always how he spelled it in documents. How he could have the English spelling (as opposed to "Henri" or "Heinrich", which you would expect) while his brothers had "normal" German names is a total mystery.