Howard, you've an excellent summary as you have gathered a lot of hard-to-grasp material. We have argued back and forth for decades on the spelling and the nomenclature of the Original 13. Some folks will never get it. There simply are few rules to go by. This drives some people bananas, and generally those have little or no clue. And if you have no understanding, you will simply have to trust us who have been there--or stand the burden of it all yourselves. This is hard to accept for many who simply "copy" stuff from LDS or FTM or the net to fill up their memorial books. Many genealogists have no language or linguistic background and find it nigh on impossible to be flexible in these things. And when you look from the outside and consider English a veritable ungrammatical language, it gets even more complex. Helen(e), for example, using a silent "H" becomes Ellen, or Elin. Then we could discuss Lena, Magda, Eleanor and the many usages of this bibical name in a great many other languages, too. Some folks do not even understand the difference 'tween diminutives and nicknames. And this is only with the written name. You don't always know who held the pen or understood or misunderstood the name, either. And, to complicate matters, surnames were in their infancy, too, during these times. The "S" in many of these names dropped off in time, i.e., Kunders>Cunrads>Cunard or Conard, a metasthesis of Conrad...common usage even today makes some WV Conrads call the name CONARD, spelled CONRAD--rhyming with "honored." And, we have not addressed vowel quality, but will say that the U often became an O and the O pronounced as U...like honey, comrade (Irish pronunciation), money, etc. CONARD and CUNARD were pronounced the same in many places for many years, and CONARD, too, as CUN'erd--endures even today in parts of PA, OH and IN. What would old Thones Kunders say today to those who insist on "ka-NARD"? Or the now-defunct "Q-NARD" by the Steamship Folks (family sold line 100+ yrs ago) As a self-appointed Kunders historian, I concur with the learned Judge Conrad in using the spellings of TK's sons as the few remaining samples of their signatures show...Cunraed Cunraeds, Madtis Conders, John Cunrads & Henry Cunred. To say they were known otherwise is also okay, and we need to give each other a bit of latitude. The KUNDERS surname, even today, is not standardized, as CONARD, CUNARD, CONRAD, CUNNARD, CONNARD, and CONERD are used, in frequency and even the small CUNERD group may be connected to Kunders yet! But the K is long-gone. Coonrod, Conrade, Conrads, Canard, Counard families today have no connection whatsoever with the Kunders lineage--tho some persist in claiming it. Judge Conrad was simply incorrect in assuming TK's wife was a Streeper...He made very few errors, though, in his 1891 treatise, so give him some slack, please. This careful Delaware jurist and historian has long been accepted as highly competent. The usage or spelling of Thomas for Thones is simply ignorance, not disagreement, pure ignorance, and people pick that up, too, even today and believe it right because they "saw it somewhere." Thones and variant spellings are simply forms of Anthony, and Thones rhymes with Dennis, and the voiceless T and the voiced D, made in the same articulatory place, was a natural for the anglicized "Dennis." Subsequent generations of Kunders descendants were named both Dennis and Anthony...and Dennis has won out, numerically, illogical as it may seem! The H in Thones is mute. Henry, the #4 son of Thones Kunders, is referred to as "Henry Kooners" when he bought his land in Whitpain township in 1710, one of the few references to him with the "K." John Cunrads, #3 son of TK, has sometimes been called Kunders, and Cunnard...Madtis, aka Mathew, Matthew, named for his grandfather Mattheis Doors, seems to have written his name "Conders," and this was likely pronounced as as "Cunders," differing only from Kunders by the first initial, the K being unpopular and often dropped by Germans in their eagerness to anglicize. Oh, yes, when you see #3 son as Jan and #4 son as Hendrick, you have really found a dandy! These are Dutch names, and KUNDERS was not Dutch. Close geographically but not... My learned German scholar friends tell me, and they have PhDs in German history too, that the language over there--then--was in such a period of transition that there was little consistency, rule-wise, and this adds to our consternation. So, friends, if the learned Niepoth and Mackes were walking on eggshells in extracting records in their NATIVE language and in their NATIVE country why do we insist on keeping such and such spelling or pronunciation, often written by an uninformed English historian or pedantic bureaucrat? And how many of us possess the linguistic background to argue the usage, or misusage, of the umlaut? We must pay homage to the late Dorothy Streeper and the Streeper family, who over sixty years ago, hired these learned German scholars, Niepoth and Mackes, pre-WWII, for researching. And, heaven forbid, what if we addressed the varied spellings of op den Gräff or even Kuster(s) today? No thank you, I do not need the practice. Cheers! Erik P. Conard