Interesting Wiederhold Ancestors
Going through the books and collecting all kind of references for the genealogy has revealed some interesting aspects of the broader family history. Many Wiederholds were landowners, and as such eligible to become citizens and vote, so that there are substantial records.
Many were also officials, i.e. bureaucrats, could write, leading to more early records.
Places
The earliest ancestors I could link to, then using the name Wedderold, lived at the border of Hessen and Westfalen. They all trace back in the male line to a single ancestor, Volland, who was a judge in Marsberg, Westfalen starting in 1229. Some matrilineal lines can be traced futher back. Most known Wedderolds owned land, had civic roles, and served the local nobility. After the reformation, spread by the availabilty of printing after 1450, and the ensuing thirty-years war (1618-1648) many moved further south in Hessen, becoming protestant or further east, to the Eichsfeld region of Thüringen, an area that reverted to catholicsm. Later some Wiederholds entered the book-making business in Frankfurt an Main. When prosperity returned there was a baby boom, greatly increasing the population of Germany.
By the early 1800s the availability of cotton caused shepherds to lose customers and emigrate. Soon after many craftsmen, as weavers, were impacted by the mechanization of cloth-making. Many Wiederholds emigrated, mainly to the U.S., but also to South America.
Today, the greatest fraction of Wiederholds live in central Hessen, Germany, but they are also found all over the world. Major families have emigrated and settled in the American midwest. Another concentration is in found southern Chile.
- I tend to use the local spelling for German states, as Hessen for Hesse; Westfalen for Westphalia; Thüringen for Thuringa; Sachsen for Saxonia; Bayern for Bavaria; etc.
Names
Wedderold was not the only alternate name used by our ancestors. Since few people could read in the middleages, alternate spellings abound. More alterante spellings occurred when Widerholds emigrated; in fact in the US ythere are more descendants with alternate spellings as Weatherholt than Wiederholds.
Most of the consistent name spellings are listed as
Name Changes, with counts of their occurence in the recent Wiederhold genealogy. A story by Alwin Wiederhold,
shows that having an unusual name does not always avoid confusion.
Moving Around
Farmers are closely bound to their land, and moved rarely. Younger sons would not receive an inheritance of land, and unless they found a well-off daughter or widow, were unable to settle and raise a family. Male siblings, if family circumstances allowed, might be sent off to local seminaries or universities to become pastors or teachers, or became mercenaries, soldiers of fortune. Daughters might receive a dowry to make it easier to find a partner.
The original inhabitants of the area, the Chatten, after a 9th century battle, were already described by the Romans ferocious fighters. Hessian soldiers appear in many stories. A military academy was established around 1609 in Hessen by the duke Johann VII. von Nassau-Siegen. Where family finances allowed, their younger sons could be well trained there and become officers. Hessian soldiers fought in many wars on many sides [Christian Kodritzki: Seitenwechsel, Eigenverlag, Offenbach, Hessen, Germany, 2007].
To provide context I created a
timeline of major events that affected Wiederholds and their neighbors.
After two general stories of early Wiederholds, I list some well-known Wiederholds. It includes several mercenary officers who did well; many others died young in battles, as fighting the invasion of the Turks in southern Europe. As soldiers they went to remote places in those days that could mean just to one of the other many states that later combined to form Germany or actually far away. Some joined the trading companies and went to Indies. If they did not became famous those Wiederholds and their children are hard to track.
Interesting ancestors
Gio has copied or summarized some stories about interesting ancestors, using information from books and Internet resources as Wikipedia. Alfred Wiederhold describes some in
the summary of his work (English translation by Dottie Wiederhold). My stories are likely to be corrected and updated as more information becomes available.
The story about Hendrich Julius Wiederhold was contributed by George Molenkamp. More stories are welcome.
- The
earliest direct ancestors found lived along the Diemel river that separates the provinces of Westfalen and Hessen in central Germany. The records start with a
Volland, a judge in 1229 in Marsberg, Westfalen, Germany, who gave the name Wedderold to one of his sons.
To make the text easier to access it has been
transcribed by Josephine and Gio Wiederhold and subsequently
translated to English by Google and Gio Wiederhold.
- The
Wiederhold families living in the central German region of Eichsfeld further east are ancestors of the majority of Wiederholds that settled in the Americas. This story is a draft to provide insights into their background.
- Johannes Wiederhold (1578-1626), a promoter of Luther, drowned in the thirty-years war. His wife and children may have fled to Eichsfeld. If so, he would be the ancestor of most Wiederholds in the USA.
-
Konrad Wiederhold (1598-1687) is a mercenary officer who became famous as the defender of the Hohentwiel fortress during the thirty-years war. A copy of an
1839 story about Konrad was scanned by Alfred Wiederhold and attached to his 12 volumes.
- Georg Reinhardt Wiederhold (1599), went with his soldiers to Holland. Some descendants are found all over Europe.
- Henrich Reinhard Wiederhold (1631-1673) took on bookbinding in Frankfurt, an expanding profession after the invention of printing.
- Johann Hermann Wiederhold (1635-1683) came from a Frankfurt family, becoming a well-known publisher and translator in Geneva. He is best known for printing an early French version of the French bible.
- NiklausWetterhold (1700-1728) There is a large family that used the name Wetterhold in the Alsace region. That area that was controlled at times by Germany, at other times and now by France, although most are German-speaking. Alfred Wiederhold and I found some citations that their ancestors were Wiederholds from Hessen that went to the Alsace as shepherds. Most of them remained shephers, but some became tailors. I have no records of landownwership there. At least two of their descendants went to the USA and have many descendants there. Johann Niklaus Wetterhold(1700-1729) went to Virginia around 1756. Johannes Heinrich Wetterhold (1813-1869) went to the US about 1845. His son settled in Michigan.
Alfred Wiederhold's genealogy uses mainly German spellings of their given names. Where I found French source citations I have used the French spellings of the give names, and entered the German versions as Also-Known-As(AKA) entries.
- Jean Caspar Wiederhold (1703-1768) got an appointment in the duchy of Zweibrücken, now the Bas-Rhin region of France, and so started the French Wiederhold branch. His descendants are now spread all over France.
Several emigrated to the US. There families mainly used the spelling Weatherhold and variations of that name.
- Bernard Wiederhold, (1757-1810) an enterprising mercenary in the Napleonic wars, with descendants in Portugal, Scotland, Canada, Oregon, and California.
- Hendrich Julius Wiederhold (1724-1788) went as a soldier for the VOC to the Indies and settled there. A branch became the Hedrich von Wiederholds. Some live now in the Netherlands and the USA.
A comprehensive story is told by George Molenkamp in English and
in Dutch.
- Andreas Wiederhold (1731-1803) was a Hessian mercenary officer who fought for the British in what had become the independent United States from May 1776 to August 1785. During that time he kept a detailed journal, with a number of sketches, which became an important source for historians of the U.S. war of independence. A fascinating event was that, after being captured at Trenton by George Washington's army who had crossed the Delaware in December 1776, he had dinner with Genreal Washington the day after, discussing the reasons for the defeat, apparently blaming the weak leadership of the British commander. Andreas remainded a prisoner-of-war until 1779 when there was an exchange with U.S. prisoners-of-war. The return to Quebec was very dramatic. Andreas was recaptured, and exchanged again in 1780.
- An interesting ancestor of the first Wiederholds in what is now Californa is James Douglas (1803-1877), a Scottish fur trader, who wound up. among other roles, being in charge from 1839-1846, of
Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River (just north of Portland), before that area was ceded to the United States. He negotiated with the Russian fur hunters and traders there, and with the Mexicans to establish a trading post at Yerba Buena, now San Francisco. I copied here his biography from the Dictionary of Candian Biography, Volume X.
- François Joseph Wiederhold, (1816-1893) left the Alsace region of France, went to the German settlement in Russia, returned, got married and then left in 1846 with three young children and settled in Ohio. That story is in French and copied from a webesite there.
More than 100,000 Germans had responded to a 1736 invitation by Czarina Catherine II, a former German princess, to settle in Russia. A few Wiederholds settled in designated Volga colonies. By 1870 most of the granted privileges had been revoked and many of those Germans went to Dakota and Nebraska. Those that remained suffered severe privations, and after Hittler's attack on Russia most were exiled to Siberia or killed.
- An interesting Wiederhold relative is Franz Schmidt (1818-1853), a delegate to the 1848 first democratic assembly in Germany. He had to flee and wound up in St.Louis, Missouri, USA.
- Heinrich Wilhelm Wiederhold (1836-1930) and Christian Friedrich Klaus Wiederhold (1831-1856) went to Southern Chile. Decendants founded San Carlos de Barriloche in Argentina.
- Gio is in process of documenting his own life. A draft of Gio Wiederhold's life has been posted on these pages.
- Gio Wiederhold's mother's family, Tuybens, also went to work for the VOC in the Netherlands East Indies, now Indonesia. That tree is being maintained separatly. The on-line Wiederhold tree only shows Gio's direct ancestors. There seem to be shared ancestors in the two trees.
- The Wiederhold records show a line of Droz, including a
Jean-Pierre Droz (1707?-1793), who emigrated to East-Prussia from La Chaux-de-Fonds in the Swiss Canton of Neuchatel. There is certainly some relationship to one of the Droz families there, which include a famous maker of humanoid automatons,
Pierre Jaquet-Droz (English)
(more in German). There are also
videoclips in English and more in
in French. A longer video shows
technical details, in French on YouTube. I don't have a reliable family linkage yet to the Swiss Droz family, but we enjoy the possibility.
- The rulers of Hessen played an important role in the fortune of many Wiederholds and Wedderolds in earlier days. For instance, Count Hendrik II. of Brabant (1204-1308), assembled, with the help of his wealthy wife Sophie von Thüringen (1224-1275), many small counties in central Germany. As Heinrich I. of Hessen he became the first Landgraf of what is now the state of Hessen in Germany. References to these rulers appear in a number of genealogy entries.
Some remote familial relationships to those ruulers are documented.
There is also a summary of the titles used and their significance.
Insights gained
Working on the genealogy provides many insights into the past. Many marriages in the past were arranged in order to retain or increase land ownership. Intermarriages among cousins to various degrees, aunts and uncles are common. Since many men left to become soldiers, there are quite a number of unwed mothers, their children would take on the mother's family names, if even the father was known. There was no privacy in village life, and the pastors were well-informed about local happenings. If the father decided to marry the mother subsequently they may have had to pay a Kirchenbusse, a penalty fee to the church. Violating local norms often motivated a move to another town or country.
Rules imposed by the church authorities appear to change over time. That becomes most obvious from copies of church records I have obtained. Most are from catholic churches in the Eichsfeld region, transcribed be genealogists that family there. When the pastor of a church changed, the completeness of entries and the spellings of names may change as well. When people moved out of or into the parish the records will be incomplete. I try to match names among those parishes, but since given names were reused I can never be completly certain. Notes about the assumptions I made are with the individual entries.
In a few cases political disagreements led to emigration. Two Wiederhold cases are documented.
Enjoy!
back to Wiederhold Family front page. This file updated 10 July 2022.