Hi List Members, For those of you who have PA German ancestors, I thought that I would share something new that I learned yesterday about German naming patterns. I found a couple of posts made by a couple of professional genealogy researchers who said that they have never found any consistent pattern in naming their children like you usually see among other ethnic groups, i.e., first son after the father's father, first daughter after the mother's mother, and so on. They did mention that these PA German people named their children after one of the baptism sponsors. I checked this theory out with both my Adams and Schmidt families of Lancaster County, PA and they were right, they named each child after the man or woman, depending on whether it was a boy or girl, after the baptism sponsor. So much for trying to find out what your oldest ancestor's father's name was by what he named his first son with these German ancestors. Joan Lowrey, who is 3/4 German, said, "As far as naming the first son after the husband's father, etc., I have never found a German family who followed any such pattern. (Maybe there was such a pattern, but being Germans, they weren't about to follow it. <g>)" (From APG-L at Rootsweb) Linda Monticelli ************************************** See what's new at http://www.aol.com