Hi.....I'm desperately searching for Jurgen Thomas Sand (I think the name is correct) born sometime in 1957 in or near Darmstadt, Germany. Mother's name was Gertrude Sand. Father was an American Soldier Stationed in Germany around 1956-1957. Any help would be so greatly appreciated.
I am trying to trace the birth records of Henry (Heinrich) Thies. Henry was born in Frankfurt am Main in approx. 1848-50. His father was also Henry and his mother was Elizabeth.
I am looking for information on John REDING born about 1832 in Budingen Hesse Darmstadt. This could be my great, great grandfather. If so his parents were John REDING and Elizabeth, maiden name unknown. My John was in Baltimore, Maryland USA by the early 1850's and served for the Union in the Civil War. He died in 1917.
I would like to find more on this family and possibly make contact with other REDING researchers and persons with the REDING surname.
Are you certain that you have the name spelled correctly in German? I checked GEOGEN and found that there are only 44 entries with that spelling in the phone book for all of Germany, most of them in Berlin, where they could have come from anywhere. There is only one in all of Hessen, and that one is in the industrial city of Kassel and could be from anywhere.
I too have ancestors from a village near Büdingen who came across just in time to lose a son, my g-g-uncle, in the battle of Lynchburg. The surname was Kraft, which is common in that area. I have been there and found it a most amusing place to be from. Büdingen was once the capital of a tiny minikingdom named Yssenberg. An immigrant from anywhere in Yssenberg might very well have said the he came from Büdingen, not expecting an American to be able find a smaller place on any map available here.
I wish you luck in your inquiry. I fear that you are going to need it!!
Hi and thanks for contacting me. If you are asking am I sure of the spelling of REDING I believe so. I have the death certificate for John Reding and in all census records from 1860 until 1910 showing John the spelling is either Reding, Redding or Reading. I have been searching for information on John, his first wife and kids and his parents for over 25 years without luck and I've resigned myself to the fact that I may never find anything but I have to keep trying. If I've learned anything while doing genealogy it's sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you hope for miracles.
German phonetic rules are different from ours. German surnames are often respelled soon after arrival to preserve the sound of the name using English phonetic rules. This means that formal records are a weak guide to the original spelling. One has to use some imagination to guess what would be phonetic in German. Reding is ambigous; it fails to provide a clear sense of the sound. Redding and Reading are both quite clear and totally different. Which appears first, that is, in the earliest records???
There is a moderately common German surname which provides a credible phonetic match with Reading. Geogen shows 1169 entries nationwide for Riedinger, including a handful in the relevant County (Kreiss). Büdingen is no longer a capital and lies in the modern Kreiss Wetterau.
I have yet to find any surname to match Redding with any hits in Kreiss Wetterau.
