In a message dated 7/23/02 2:00:44 AM Pacific Daylight Time, [email protected] writes: << Through my research of Bonner's I believe that there are at least two distinct 'populations' that use the surname, Bonner. One line has its origins in the Irish Catholic population that is originally from County Donegal, Ireland. Many of them poor and illiterate, left Ireland in the nineteenth century and settled near large northern cities such as Philadelphia. In Philadelphia for example, the vast majority of Bonner's are descendant from Irish Catholics. [This is where my line comes from]. There is at least another population that came from Scotland (including the so called, Scotch-Irish) and/or England. These folks were largely from the Protestant faith. In this latter population my research in the Bonner surname suggests that many of the Protestant Bonner's settled into the southern United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It's my opinion that this Bonner population has no "blood relation" to the Irish Catholic one mentioned above >> Dear List Readers, I thought this above information to be very interesting but the writer has left out a large number of Bonners that have their origins in Germany, Austria, and a few in Switzerland. The word "Bonner" translates to mean a person from Bonn which is a large city in Germany and for a long time was its capital seat. Judy Martin <[email protected]>