Data compiled from Dillman Family Association Family Group Fact Sheets. This analysis covers all 160 documented family groups (Groups 1–163, with confirmed gaps at Groups 25, 46, 105, and 129, and Group 116 consolidated into Group 85) — the full dataset referenced as a future update in Part One.

Part One of this series drew a statistical portrait of the Dillman surname from 94 documented Family Groups. Sixty-six more groups have since been added to the collection, bringing the total to 160. This article revisits each of Part One’s findings against the fuller dataset — what holds, what shifts, and what the additional groups reveal that wasn’t visible before.

The short version: the core picture from Part One holds up well. The surprises are at the margins — and one of those margins turns out to be the most interesting finding in either article.

What Held, What Didn’t

Several headline figures from Part One replicate almost exactly against the full 160-group set. Sixteen of the documented groups have a Canadian presence — proportionally lower than Part One’s 16.0%, but consistent with the same broad pattern: Canada as both a primary destination and a transit route to the American Midwest. Settlement is still documented on six continents. Twenty-one groups participate in the Dillman DNA Project — the same 21 as Part One, a finding with its own section below. And the oldest documented line is still Group 30, the Dielemans of Zeeland and East Flanders, tracing to Petrus Dieleman, born around 1450.

One correction is overdue regardless of any of this: Part One listed five colonial-era arrivals predating American independence (Groups 29, 7, 1, 2, and 3). A sixth belongs on that list. Group 94, Georg Martin Dillmann of Baden, arrived in America in 1759 according to Werner Hacker’s eighteenth-century register of emigrants from southwest Germany.^[1] Group 94 was within the scope of Part One’s own 94-group analysis and was simply missed. All six colonial-era arrivals landed in Philadelphia.

A Name Forged in Conflict

The most substantial new finding in this dataset didn’t come from adding more groups — it came from asking a different question of the data already there. Cross-referencing each group’s documented immigration year against the conflicts and political upheavals of their countries of origin reveals that Dillman emigration isn’t randomly distributed across the centuries. It clusters tightly around a handful of specific historical pressure points, and different clusters have entirely different causes.

134 of 160 groups have a parseable immigration year. © Dillman Family Association 2026.

The 1848–1859 period is the single largest immigration window in the entire dataset — 21 groups, 19 of them German-origin, overlapping almost exactly with the Revolutions of 1848 and the economic instability that followed their suppression across the German states. This finding was effectively invisible in Part One’s straight decade-by-decade count, which split the surge across the “1840s” and “1850s” buckets separately.

The 1900s “peak” reported in Part One turns out to be two unrelated waves stacked on top of each other — two empires, two draft laws, two different decades of families running from the same kind of conscription.

German-origin emigration had already crested in the 1880s and 1890s — 25 groups, the largest single-decade total for Germany specifically — and was declining sharply by 1900 as German industrialization absorbed the labor that had previously gone overseas.^[2] A British royal commission report on German emigration noted the same pattern at the time: a “largest wave” beginning after 1880 that “only began to subside in the mid-1890s,” after which annual emigration from Germany fell from well over a million a year to under 40,000.^[2] Much of that 1880s wave reflects young men emigrating to avoid the universal military conscription imposed after German unification in 1871.

So what actually drives the 1900–1913 total Part One flagged as the immigration peak? Almost entirely the Russian-German cluster — 9 of the 25 groups in that window, plus 5 more from elsewhere in the former Russian Empire. These are Volga German and Black Sea German families fleeing a different draft law: Russia’s 1871 decree stripping German colonists of their self-governance, followed by the 1874 Universal Conscription Act that ended a century of promised military exemption for the Volga colonies.^[3] The first delegations to scout emigration sites in America left the Volga colonies within months of that 1874 law passing, and the resulting wave continued until the outbreak of World War I in 1914 — exactly the shape this dataset shows.

Two more conflict-linked patterns deserve a mention. The Alsace-origin groups in this dataset cluster in the 1860s–1880s, consistent with the documented wave of more than 130,000 Alsace-Lorrainers who chose to emigrate rather than become German subjects after the 1871 Treaty of Frankfurt ceded the region to the new German Empire.^[4] And the dataset shows a complete absence of new arrivals between 1930 and 1945 — no surprise, given Depression-era U.S. immigration quotas and the near-total halt of transatlantic civilian travel during the Second World War, but worth stating plainly rather than leaving as a silent gap.

Where They Settled

New York remains the dominant first point of settlement by a wide margin, with Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Ohio rounding out the traditional top tier. The expanded dataset adds three states that didn’t register in Part One’s top rankings at all: California, New Jersey, and Missouri.

Eighteen of the 160 groups have a documented Canadian connection — twelve of those represent genuine settlement, and six are transit-only, families who crossed Canadian soil on their way to a U.S. destination without staying. Of the twelve settlements, a clear pattern emerges: every Saskatchewan and Manitoba settlement in the dataset (Groups 37, 53, 54, 57, and 58) is a Volga-Saratov Russian-German family — the same conflict-migration story from the previous section, landing on the Canadian prairies instead of the American ones. The Nova Scotia pair (Groups 2a and 18) are a different story entirely: eighteenth-century Hessian-soldier arrivals from the Revolutionary War era, more than a century earlier.^[5]

The Spellings, Refined

Part One classified spelling variants by the form most commonly used in original German records, finding Dillmann dominant at 48 of 94 groups (51.1%), with Dielmann second at 14 groups (14.9%) and the Americanized Dillman at 7 groups (7.4%). Applying the identical one-spelling-per-group method to the full 160 groups produces a closely consistent picture: Dillmann still leads at 77 groups (48.1%), Dielmann holds second at 17 groups (10.6%), and Dillman sits at 14 groups (8.8%).

The one form that shifts meaningfully is Diehlmann, which grows from 2.2% of groups in Part One to 6.9% across the full dataset — a real change in the picture, not noise. Four entirely new primary spellings also appear for the first time in Groups 95–163: Delmer (Group 148, Durham, England), Sillmann (Group 115, Baden), Dahlman (Group 117, Norway), and Dillemann (Group 123, Belgium/France). The full dataset now documents 25 distinct primary spellings across 160 groups, up from 21 in the original 94.

DNA: A Stalled Project

Twenty-one of the 160 documented groups participate in the Dillman DNA Project — the identical count reported in Part One, when 21 of 94 groups participated. The raw number hasn’t moved at all. The proportion has: DNA participation has fallen from 22.3% of documented groups to 13.1%, because every single one of the 66 newly added groups has so far joined the documentary record without a single new DNA participant.

That’s worth stating directly rather than burying in a footnote: not one of the 66 most recently documented Family Groups has a member in the DNA project. The genetically-distinct-lines finding from Part One — at least 12 separate Dillman lines confirmed by Y-DNA and autosomal testing, none descending from a single common ancestor^[6] — remains the most powerful argument the DFA has for why DNA testing matters to individual researchers. It’s also, increasingly, an argument the DFA needs to make more often. If the pattern holds for the roughly 40 additional Family Group Sheets anticipated in a future expansion, the DNA project’s share of the documented population will keep shrinking even as the documentary record grows. Members of any of the 66 groups added since Part One are particularly encouraged to consider joining.

Jewish and Hebrew Families: Eight Stories, Not Five

Part One identified five Family Groups of Jewish or Hebrew origin, distinct from the German-surname Dillman lines that make up the bulk of the dataset: two related Litin, Ukraine families (Groups 20 and 52), and individual groups from Romania (42), Palestine (82), and Belarus (86). A careful pass through the full 160-group dataset — checking every group for explicit textual evidence rather than relying on keyword matching alone — confirms all five and adds three more.

Group 131 is an Odessa, Ukraine family — the Dulman/Kushner family who settled in Boston between 1910 and 1915, explicitly documented as Jewish in the source sheet. Group 149 traces to Yanov, Belarus, a tailor named Isaac Dilman who settled in Baltimore. Both fit the same broad pattern as the original five: emigration from the Pale of Settlement region in the early twentieth century, the same decades and the same documented waves of anti-Jewish pogroms — particularly 1881–1884 and 1903–1906 — that drove an estimated three million Jews out of the Russian Empire between 1881 and 1917.^[7]

Group 139 is a different story. The Sternbach family of Vienna, Austria fled “in the early months of World War II,” per the source sheet — an Anschluss-era refugee story rather than a Pale-of-Settlement one. Elizabeth Sternbach emigrated first, her husband followed, and the family anglicized its name to Stanford after arriving in the United States. It’s a reminder that “Jewish family in the Dillman dataset” isn’t a single migration story across these eight groups, but at least two distinct ones separated by sixty years and an ocean of historical context.^[8]

A Living Dataset, Continued

The 160 groups analyzed here still aren’t the complete picture. Roughly 40 additional Family Group Sheets are anticipated in a future expansion, which will likely warrant a Part Three revisiting these same questions again. If the pattern from Part One to Part Two holds, the core findings will mostly stay intact — and the real value will again be in the margins: a new conflict cluster, a new spelling variant, a new Jewish-origin family with its own distinct story, a settlement state nobody expected.

That, more than any single statistic, may be the actual finding of this two-part series: the Dillman Family Association’s documentation project has grown large enough that it now behaves like a real historical dataset, the kind where adding more data changes not just the numbers but the questions worth asking of them.

The Dillman Family Association’s Family Group Fact Sheets are available to members at dillmanfamilyassociation.org. Researchers interested in contributing to or joining a specific family group are encouraged to contact the DFA. The Dillman DNA Project is open to all male-line Dillman descendants and is hosted at FamilyTreeDNA; contact the project administrator at dnaprojectadmin@dillmanfamilyassociation.org to participate. Information is current as of the date of this article.

Sources

1. Dillman Family Association, Family Group Fact Sheet, Group 94 — Georg Martin Dillmann of Baden, Germany, citing Werner Hacker, Eighteenth Century Register of Emigrants from Southwest Germany to America and Other Countries.
2. “Causes and Effects of Emigration from Germany (1870s–1880s),” German History in Documents and Images, German Historical Institute (accessed June 2026).
3. “Migration,” Volga German Institute; “Immigration 1875–1924,” Norka, Russia, citing research by Dr. Igor Pleve (accessed June 2026).
4. “The Option of Nationality,” Encyclopédie d’histoire numérique de l’Europe (EHNE) (accessed June 2026).
5. Dillman Family Association, Family Group Fact Sheets, Groups 2 (subgroup A), 18, 37, 53, 54, 57, 58 (various dates).
6. Dillman Family Association, Dillman DNA Project, dillmanfamilyassociation.org/dillman-dna-project/ (accessed June 2026).
7. “The Pale of Settlement,” Jewish Virtual Library (accessed June 2026).
8. Dillman Family Association, Family Group Fact Sheets, Groups 20, 42, 52, 82, 86, 131, 139, 149 (various dates).
9. Dillman Family Association, “What the Numbers Tell Us: A Statistical Portrait of the Dillman Surname,” dillmanfamilyassociation.org (Part One of this series, published June 2026).
10. Dillman Family Association, Family Group Fact Sheets, Groups 95–163 (various dates 2024–2026).

AI Disclosure: This article was researched and written with the assistance of Claude, an AI assistant developed by Anthropic. Statistical data is drawn directly from the Dillman Family Association’s Family Group Fact Sheets, cross-referenced with external historical sources cited above. All figures reflect the 160 groups documented to date and will be updated as additional groups are added to the study.

Notes

1. All family group data cited in this article is drawn from the Dillman Family Association, Family Group Sheet Database, compiled 2026; internal database, Dillman Family Association. Individual family group sheets are numbered and held by the DFA.