At 05/15/2002 02:17 AM Wednesday, Sperong@aol.com wrote: *********START OF ORIGINAL MESSAGE TEXT********* >I work with a man named John Briehl which is the more modern >day spelling. His father came here from Germany. Although it >is hard to be positive I think it likely that most Broyles are >descendants from Germania. **********END OF ORIGINAL MESSAGE TEXT*********** I've never run across the spelling BRIEHL in any German records that have to do with our Johannes BREYHEL (John BROYLES). Again, your acquaintance, John BRIEHL, "might" be related back many generations to our Johannes BREYHEL/BREHEL/BREUL, but his name is BRIEHL. When his ancestors came to this country, they didn't change their name to BROYLES! To have done so would entail such a convoluted logic and chain of events to make it to be out of the realm of the possible. The changing of the surname of our ancestor to BROYLES was due to the lack of language training of the English-speaking clerks in VA in the early 1700's. They just wrote down what they "heard". And, those "BROYLES" emigrants didn't speak English (not for several generations) and had no idea WHAT was being written down on official documents. So, in the case of the lawsuit brought by Lt. Gov. Spotswood against the 2nd Colony emigrants, John's (Johannes') surname was written BRYOLL. You can find it spelled a dozen different ways in other documents. The upshot of all of this is that ONE spelling predominated, and was eventually accepted by the descendants of John's son, Hans Jacob, BROYLES. (You WILL find it as BROILES, BROIL, BROYLE, etc., in some lines, but it's still a variant spelling of BROYLES.) Please, I don't mean to sound condescending or superior -- it's just that I was trained as a linguist and spent 22 years in the USAF as an Interpreter/Interrogator. I have also taken just about every college course available in Linguistics. All of which leads me to one conclusion: no later German emigrant, with whatever spelling variant of the same German surname ever changed his/her name to BROYLES. It just wouldn't make sense. George