Through George Durman, I received the following message: "I was wondering if you have a list of the Blankenbeckler families that settled in Virginia. I came across a George B. Blankenbeckler of St. Clair, VA, who married my cousin Mary Tilson on Feb. 1, 1867. [. . .] I was wondering if they could be part of John Blankenbaker's family. I know the name has several spellings."
The inquirer was certainly correct on one point. The name does have several spellings. A person recently told me that she had found 44 different spellings for Willheit and I told her that if there were as many as letters as in the name which became Blankenbaker, et al, that her record would not stand.
One of the immigrants of the name Blankenbuehler was Johann Nicholas. He had a son Zacharias (born in Germany) who had a son Zacharias. This grandson of John Nicholas moved, probably after the Revolution, to southwest Virginia in the area which became Wythe County. So Zacharias had no relatives with the same surname living in the area. He had considerable freedom to spell the name in any way that he chose. Two main variations developed, Blankenbeckler and Blankenbecler. These are not all that far from the original name. Several descendants felt that these were too long and so they shortened the name to such variants such as Blanken and Beckler, and other variations of these.
There is in the larger Blankenbuehler family a similar situation which arose in the line of the 1717 immigrant Matthias Blankenbuehler family. Matthias has a son George, who married Mary Gerhard. After a son was born in the decade of the 1740's, named John, and George died, Mary remarried and went with her new husband to North Carolina. Of course, John Blankenbuehler, George's son, went also. In North Carolina he was the only one with the name. In due course, he married and had four sons. Within in the family there was a tendency to regard the surname as a compound name. Within the compound name they chose to use the last part, Pickler, as the surname. What is remarkable is that all four sons adopted this spelling.
These two instances tell us that, if a man has an unusual name and is the only bearer of it in his neighborhood, then the probability will be high that he will adopt a variant spelling. In this instance, both men harkened to a common theme, namely Blankenbeckler and Pickler, where the Picklers adopted a shorter form. The "p"'s and "b"'s are interchangeable and the vowels do not count.
In Germany today, the name is spelled in two ways, Blankenbuehler and Plankenbuehler. In America, it ranges from Baker and Blank to Blankenbeckler.
(16 Aug 05)
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.