[OneVike]

My ancestry leads to a gentleman named Mathias Zimmerman who was born on December 2, 1752 in PA. Zimmerman is German for carpenter. So I read that he Anglicized his last name to reflect his trade in English and thus took on the last name of Carpenter.

I often wondered why he would anglicized his name. Who would not be proud of their ancestry? Now I am wondering if he did so because a relative may have been a German who came to America to fight for the British.

He would have been an adult during the revolution, but maybe the name Zimmerman came with bad memories for some. Who knows but my ancestry, on my Grandfathers side, stops with him and thus goes no farther back that I have been able to trace.

Curious is all, just curious.

[the OlLine Rebel]

Thing is, there were plenty Germans here (the unsung ethnicity in our culture - even though it’s the biggest group of all time) already. Mountain men from VA through PA. And Dutch and nordic settlers of similar background around “NYC” in NJ and NY, etc. There was consideration of making German an official language for this country.

I wish people appreciated more our German heritage. Lots of it shows in our emphasis on Christmas time, e.g. That is German, not English - or Irish.

[Pharmboy]

I would imagine it would have depended on where he settled; about 10% of the colonies at the time spoke German, and if he lived in a largely German area, he probably would have retained Zimmerman; but if he moved to, say, NYC, where many of the non-English (including the French, the Dutch and the Germans) Anglicized their names after they took over the city in 1664 he might have become Carpenter.