I think Kathleen's response may be close to the answer. Some Lutheran and other Protestant families, both German and Scandinavian did keep the Saint's name traditions. Mary may have hit on a hidden clue, if you're sure these names refer to the same person. Maybe your ancestor chose a more American-sounding name of his own accord (John Bernard / Johann Bernhard - completely unrelated to Ludwid Karl / Louis Charles). Often folks were baptized with a spiritual name (Saint's name or name day) and given another name (call name: favorite Saint, parent, etc.), then used a totally different name in life. Often the entire family of same gender siblings would appear to have the exact same first name because of these old practices. These pages give good explanation of this: http://www.kerchner.com/germname.htm http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~footprintsfromthepast/naming_customs_ and_traditions.htm (both in context of PA German tradition, but generally applicable) A distant cousin's wife has some help: http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~hornbeck/naming2.htm It's been some years since I focused much attention to German research, but the German Rootsweb lists could be a good place to post this Q, or do a search of a German list archive, where many discussions on the topic can be found. Just from my own experience, the Baden-Wurttemberg list has some wonderfully knowledgeable folk who are willing to help. The German FAQ site: http://www.genealogienetz.de/faqs/sgg.html The Germany GenWeb http://www.rootsweb.com/~wggerman/ and other resource sites are full of links that might be too much to decide where to click in fear of ending up in a web of clicks and spending far too much time searching, but sometimes some real gems are found that way... Robert Shea's German resource links is a great site to surf. http://www.serve.com/shea/work.htm This is a fun site, where you can enter a German or other (6 languages) name or title and translate it to it's equivalent. http://www8.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/html/wwp/engl/entr/trans.html Glückliche Jagd! Di