Entry #52

With this entry, I am successfully completing the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks blogging challenge!

Right before Christmas I received new information about my maiden name – Biermann, or Beermann as it was spelled prior to 1910. It seems a fitting way to wrap up the year with an extraordinary finding about my name. For years, I had been diligently looking for clues that would help me find the ancestral home of my paternal surname.

I don’t know how my Biermann cousins feel about our name, but I have never been that happy with it. As a sensitive teenager, I was teased about my surname and, in my twenties, I didn’t like the masculinity of the name. I often joked about changing my name to Bier-person to create gender neutrality. As I mentioned, “Biermann” was not the original spelling. It was originally “Beermann,” but my dad explained that his Uncle Cliff, his father’s brother, had changed the spelling when he owned a drugstore in Chicago.

C. J. Biermann Drugstore in Chicago

The story goes that Clifford Beermann lived in a Jewish neighborhood in Hyde Park and he wanted his surname to appear to be Jewish. He felt that would be better for business. Subsequently, he persuaded the entire family to adopt the uniform spelling of “Biermann.”  I am a bit surprised that he kept the double “n.”  The extra “n” tacked on to a name ending with “man” is a tell-tale giveaway that the name is German. At any rate, the story has a ring of truth; I have heard of other families who standardized the spelling of their surnames around this time. My dad says that his grandfather, John F. Beermann, objected to the change. He is reported to have said, “I was born a Beermann and I’ll die a Beermann.” Indeed, he is buried under the name of “Beermann.”

In entry #51, I mentioned Monika Thölking, who helped me with my Schulte’s. She explained that she lives in Osnabrück, so I mentioned that maybe she could give me advice about finding my Franz Maune family from Belm. Monika said that she had the records at home and she found Franz Maune very quickly. Mary Elizabeth Maune, a daughter of Franz, married William Joseph Beermann in 1860. I had always assumed that William and Elisabeth married in Cincinnati, but realized that, other than the 1900 census, I didn’t have an actual citation for their marriage. Still, I have had a growing impression that they may have known one another before emigrating. I asked Monika to take a quick look for Wilhelm Joseph Beermann in Belm.

Monika reported back that, yes, she had found my great, great-grandfather. Wilhelmus Josephus Beermann was born in Belm Vehrte, Lower Saxony, in the Kingdom of Hannover. His father was Johann Christian Konersmann gen Beermann and his mother was Maria Elisabeth Hemesath. What, what, what? What does “gen” mean?  I discovered that “gen” is an abbreviation for “genannt.”

I soon learned that Beermann was not our original family surname. I had heard of this, particularly relating to this area of Northern Germany; nevertheless, I was still unprepared to find it in my own research.

Here is was Monika thinks happened. She wrote:

Maria Elisabeth Hemesath born in Harderberg, first Husband was Joducus Heinrich Casting. There are two possibilities, first the farm BEERMANN was empty and they were able to take over which means they also had to take over the name of the Farm which was BEERMANN. Second, Maria Elisabeth was married to the owner of a BEERMANN Farm and any husband following had to take this name, it was normal during this time.

I now deduce that historically my surname  probably was KONERSMANN prior to 1 November 1829, when my 3x great-grandfather married Elisabeth Hemesath, my 3x great-grandmother. The German dictionary says that “genannt” is the past participle form of the verb “nennen,” which means, “to name.” It is indicates that my Konersmann ancestor took the name of the farm that was called BEERMANN. This was also true of Elisabeth’s prior husband, Joducus Heinrich Casting genannt Beermann. What we do not know is whether or not there was a previous husband named Beermann, or if Joducus Heinrich Casting had purchased the Beermann Farm. I have found some genealogical references to the Beermann Hof (farm) in Vehrte, but I have yet to sort through them to see if I can ascertain what was happening with the ownership.

Elisabeth Hemesath had one child, Kaspar Heinrich Beermann, with her first husband. As the older brother, he would have been the male heir to the Beermann farm. The records indicate that this older son married and stayed in the area, and there were at least several more generations of Beermann descendants.  First Friedrich Adolph Beermann, then William Joseph Beermann, being without land, left Germany for Cincinnati, Ohio, in America.  William took up the trade of blacksmith.

Now, I am left to begin a line of research on my new KONERSMANN surname. Konersmann is a fairly uncommon name, but I have found that it has a limited distribution that clusters around the Osnabrück area.  See map below:

Relative distribution of Konersmann surname

Johann Christian Konersmann was born in Natrup Hagen, Osnabruck, Lower Saxony, Germany on 29 April 1786: he died 24 November 1837 in Vehrte.