Origin of the name Wedemeyer(W~D~M~R)
Meaning of the name
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The spelling of the name Wedemeier has changed through the years. The spelling of German names were unimportant in the last several centuries. Only the pronunciation was important. The "i" in meier was very commonly written with a "y" or even the whole word was just myer or myr. The Wede part has been recorded in books as Widde, Wied, Weid, or Wid. The spelling of the names were decided by the German clerks. Some clerks did try to preserve the spelling within known families but in some cases made no attempt for consistency. The families may have actually spelled their name differently than the church. The Wedemeyer name is made up of two words. The first part is Wede which could have meant forest and even pasture or Meadow. Meier or Meÿer meant farmer when German dictionaries were written in the 1800s. However, a more ancient meaning of Meyer is also a possibility here which would have been leader or chieftain of a territory or province. Therefore, we have possibilities of the humble Farmer of the Forest and Farmer of the meadow, Farmer of the pasture or the noble Chieftain of the Meadowlands. The earliest I have seen the name used is in the time of 1592 on the Market Church wall in Hannover, Germany. At that location there is portrait done in stone relief of a man named Conrad Wiedemeier. This was the exact spelling. This man was a knight of the Calenberg order, given a castle in Eldagsen, given a farm in St. Galli, Hanover and several others and a coat of arms. His family came from ancient Niedersachsen previous to the 15th century or North Saxony. The author of the website visited this location and discovered that the relief carving was destroyed during the war. It is his strong belief that this stone relief may have been photographed and preserved in a history book somewhere. We are interested in dating the different names of Wedemeyer in an effort to put together a chronology and map of descendancy of W~d~m~r names.
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There are two possible ideas about the ancient name of Wedemeyer.
1.0 Wedemeyer is an occupation name like Carpenter/Tischler or Taylor/Schneider. Therefore, the name can be held by a diverse group of people with no recent genetic relationships. This can be proven by this DNA study if we get enough participants.
2.0 Wedemeyer is a clan name for a group of people who lived in Niedersachsen (North Germany) 900 to 1300AD. All people with this similar type of name share a common ancestor.
Recent Distribution of the name W~D~M~R
(based on the German telephone directory):
History of W~d~m~r s
Please send in any historical information that you may have collected on this topic.
This site was last updated 05/07/08