All, This has been a very interesting thread! Thanks to all of you for sharing. My Heckman(n) ancestors came from Rothenberg im Odenwald, Hessen to eastern PA in 1749. My family actively supported the war for American independence; one book even claims that my g-g-g-g-great-uncles - or their similarly-named cousins - actually crossed the Delaware in George Washington's boat! A hundred years later, my g-great-grandfather Peter D. Heckman (his siblings, and other relatives) served with the PA Volunteers in the Civil War; his father and grandfather died in that decade, and both of their wills were written in German (I have not found Peter's will). Another hundred years later, my grandfather (born in 1901) spoke a good bit of "PA Dutch", and my father, far less so (and me - almost nothing!). My take on that is that "being German" was not something we wanted to advertise post WWI and WWII, so my Dad was less inclined to pick up the language. I sensed a little bit of that as I was growing up in NJ - among the Irish, Italians, Latinos, Polish and others; still, I believe I would have picked-up far more German if my Dad had raised me in his native eastern PA. Jeff Heckman Penfield, NY http://sites.google.com/site/heckmanfamilysite/ ----- Original Message ----- From: "Elizabeth Cunningham" <drybones@netreach.net> To: hesse@rootsweb.com Sent: Thursday, March 31, 2011 5:27:41 PM Subject: Re: [HESSE] Jumping to conclusions I think part of it was that they were trying to leave the "old country" behind. My father was proud that his father had been born here (of German immigrants) while his mother was an immigrant from Wuerttemberg. She never spoke English very well, I understand. Now it is sort of okay to keep your language and teach it to children, but it was not when I was a child. Everybody seemed to want to be totally American. I am 76, but do not know how far back the wanting to be American went. My mother's father, from Hesse in 1885, tried to leave his German behind also. With a name like Fuehrer, it might have been harder. Elizabeth C