<<"The family WATERHOLTER, also written WATERHOLTER with an umlaut over the 'O', comes from Wissentrup, which lies near Lage, close to Detmold." "There is still a piece of land there that is still called "The WATERHOLZ". I'm in the process of trying to get the address of the State Archives in Detmold >> Patricia, Hey, this is pretty exciting. I am researching close to the same area. My ancesters came from farms near the villages of Hörtsmar & Hagen just a 4 miles northeast of Wissentrup. My atlas shows Wissentrup just 1 mile southwest of Lage. No map references to 'The Waterholz', but it may be an area too small for my atlas to show. Please check out the Nordrhein-Westfalen rootsweb site & choose Kreis-Lippe. All the needed info is located there from state archive addresses to church addressess to local genealogical societies addresses. They also list URL's for each. http://www2.genealogy.net/gene/reg/NRHE-WFA/lippe_ev-d.html This is an old URL & may not be good still. If you can't find the website, let me know & I'll forward the URL when I get home from work. The following site gives a short history of the Principality of Lippe (and the nobility) http://w3g.med.uni-giessen.de/gene/reg/NRHE-WFA/lippe.html Just for the fun of it, why don't you do a German telephone directory search to see if there are WALTERHOLTER/WALTERHOLZ families still there. Go to: http://www02.teleauskunft.de/cgi-bin/tron.cgi or http://www.teldir.com/de/ My lines from that area: BRANDSMEIER, DRIER, HOFEMANN, DUSTERSIEK, EHLENBROKER, ENGELER, FINNEN, KRIETENSTEIN, PRUSZNER or PRÜSSNER. Any of these surnames come up in your research? Best of luck in your search. Curt