In the last note, I mentioned Annette K. Burgert and recommended, if you had the opportunity, that you hear her. I heard her at the Virginia Chapter meeting of the Palatines to America at their spring meeting.
There are lots of problems in attempting to carry a German name here back to Germany. You may be so lucky as to have a name such as Smith here. In Germany there are almost one-half million Schmids. Surprisingly, since "d" and "t" interchange so frequently, there are only 258 Schmits. But spelled as Schmitt, there are fifty-one thousand of them. All of these start "Sch", which is very typical German. But there is one solitary Shmidt in Germany. (Maybe he just wanted to be different.)
In general, searching for the origins of a Smith family in German is difficult; however, the origins of two of the Germanna Smith families have been found. The successful technique in these cases is instructive. The search was for other Germanna families; the Smith families happened to neighbors of the Clores and Weavers. But once a Germanna-like group was found, it was quite easy to identify the Smiths.
There are some common translations of German names to English. Carpenter goes back to Zimmerman, Weaver to Weber, Taylor/Tailor to Schneider, Dear/Deer to Hirsch, Cook to Koch. In the last of these cases, one researcher that I know is working on the principle of trying to find the location of friends and relatives.
Or the German name may be spelled in English to sound alike; a prime example is Vrede in German, which becomes Frady in English. Typically "-bach" becomes "back," "sch" becomes simply "sh", so that names such as Fischbach become Fishback. Also, never does the ending "man" occur in Germany, the preferred form being "mann." The ending "le" is rare in Germany; more common is the transpose, "el." Thus, there are more than five thousand Kunkels in Germany but only one Kunkle.
Another problem in searching for a name in Germany is that spelling has changed there also as it has here. Johann Michael Willheit has become many names here; in Germany, the name has changed also. One change that is common is the use of new vowels in an old name. Thus, there are 207 Schirks, 117 Scherks, 21 Schierks, and 75 Schurks.
Commonly, the spelling of Blankenbaker in Germany has been considered to be Blankenbuehler. There are over a dozen occurrences of this latter name in Germany today. It would be interesting to know if this is the same family. It is known that "Blankenbakers" remained in Germany after the 1717 emigration.
The counts of the occurrences of names used here, come from the German telephone books. These are available on-line and give you the names, addresses, and zipcodes. I don't know if there is a concept in Germany of unlisted (or private) numbers. (Maybe someone could tell us.)
Most of the thoughts today come from Ken McCrea who is the keeper of the Palatines to America homepage.
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.