Migration is never random. People follow rivers, railroads, and relatives. They settle where earlier arrivals from the same village have already staked out ground, where the land looks familiar, where the church holds services in their language. The 160 family groups in the DFA’s Family Group Sheet database make this visible in specific, traceable terms: where the Dillman families came from, when they left, and where they ended up — and the patterns, once mapped, are striking in their clarity.

The German Heartland

Of the 160 family groups documented in the database, 106 trace their origin explicitly to Germany. The remainder come from France and Alsace (10 groups), the Netherlands (3), England (3), Ukraine and Belarus (5), Austria (2), Hungary (2), Norway (3), and a scattering of other origins. The surname is overwhelmingly German in its roots, but “German” in the nineteenth century meant something considerably more complex than a modern national designation suggests.

The database reveals a clear concentration of origins in the southwestern German-speaking lands. Hesse (including Hesse-Darmstadt and Hesse-Nassau) accounts for the largest single regional cluster, with 38 mentions across origin records. Baden follows with 22, Rhineland-Palatinate with 18 to 20 depending on how Alsatian and Saarland groups are counted, and Westphalia with 15. Bavaria, despite its size, accounts for only 11 groups — reflecting both the geographic logic of emigration routes (southwestern Germans had easier access to the Rhine and the major port of Le Havre) and the religious character of Bavarian communities, which tended toward Catholicism and, historically, somewhat lower emigration rates than the Protestant southwest.

Several specific cities and towns appear repeatedly across unrelated family groups: Saarbrücken, Frankfurt, Mainz, and a cluster of villages in the Rhineland-Palatinate appear in multiple family group sheets with no apparent family connection between them, suggesting that these were genuine emigration hotspots rather than coincidences of documentation.

The Alsatian Borderland

Ten family groups trace origins to Alsace or the French-German border region — a proportion worth noting. Alsace-Lorraine changed hands between France and Germany three times between 1870 and 1945, and its residents navigated this political instability in ways that show up clearly in genealogical records. Family groups from Alsace frequently appear in both French and German records, sometimes with different surname spellings in each. The Dillmann families of Alsace are documented variously as Dillmann, Dillemanne, Dillemann, and Diehlmann depending on whether the records originate in French or German administrative periods.

For researchers, this means that Alsatian lines require fluency in both French and German record systems — a complication the database flags consistently but that individual researchers frequently overlook when searching only one tradition.

The Ports of Departure

The database documents immigration routes as well as origins, and the departure ports reveal the geography of nineteenth-century emigration with particular clarity. Bremerhaven (Bremen) dominates as a departure point for families from northern and central Germany. Le Havre was the preferred port for southwestern German families and Alsatians — particularly before the expansion of the German rail network made Bremerhaven more accessible from the Rhineland. Hamburg served families from northern Germany and, later in the century, the large volume of Eastern European Jewish emigration that appears in several of the database’s variant-surname groups.

A smaller number of families departed through Liverpool, Glasgow, or other British ports — typically having traveled through England first, either deliberately or as a result of ship routing.

The American Gateway: New York

New York City and its port appear in 52 of the 160 family group entries — by far the most frequently mentioned American location in the entire database. This reflects the dominance of New York as the primary American immigration port, particularly after the opening of Castle Garden in 1855 and Ellis Island in 1892. But the New York entries in the database are not uniformly “New York settlers.” Many families arrived in New York and moved on immediately, with the port serving as a transit point rather than a final destination. Others stayed — particularly in Brooklyn, which appears 6 times as a specific settlement location, often for families involved in trades such as wine importing, cigar manufacturing, and paperhanging.

The Inland Spread: Pennsylvania, the Midwest, and Beyond

After New York, the geographic settlement pattern in the database reflects the westward expansion of the nineteenth century with considerable precision.

Pennsylvania (18 mentions) was both an early destination — several family groups from the colonial period settled in German Pennsylvania communities in Lancaster, York, and Dauphin counties — and a transit state for families moving further west. Philadelphia appears 17 times in the database and served as both a destination and a jumping-off point for families heading into the interior.

The Midwest is where the greatest concentration of Dillman families ultimately settled. Wisconsin (14 mentions), Ohio (10), Missouri (9), Illinois (5), Indiana, and Minnesota all appear with significant frequency. The pattern follows the logic of nineteenth-century Midwestern settlement: German immigrants moved west along established routes, often following chains of earlier arrivals from the same home region.

St. Louis (13 mentions) deserves particular attention as the most frequently mentioned inland city in the database. It served as a hub for German Catholic immigration from the 1840s onward and appears as a destination for multiple Dillman family groups from Hesse, the Rhineland, Bavaria, and Alsace — none of them apparently connected to each other, but all drawn to the same city by its reputation as a German-speaking community with economic opportunity.

Chicago (11 mentions) and Milwaukee (8) reflect the later wave of German immigration in the 1870s and 1880s, when the upper Midwest was absorbing large numbers of German settlers attracted by available agricultural land and established German-speaking communities.

California (9 mentions) and San Francisco (11) appear with a frequency that may surprise researchers who associate Dillman families primarily with the Midwest. The California entries include multiple French-origin Delmon families who settled in San Francisco from the mid-nineteenth century onward, as well as German Dillmanns who arrived via the Pacific or after periods in other western states.

The Immigration Timeline

The database documents immigration events across more than two centuries, and the decade-by-decade pattern reveals the broader rhythms of German emigration to America.

The earliest groups — a handful of families arriving in the 1730s through 1770s — represent the colonial-era German immigration to Pennsylvania that predates the United States itself. These are the oldest Dillman lines in America, and several of them appear in the Revolutionary War records discussed in the Soldiers article in this series.

The major wave began in the 1840s and ran through the 1850s (12 and 18 documented groups respectively), corresponding to the political upheaval of 1848 and the economic conditions that drove mass emigration from the German states. The pace slowed somewhat in the 1860s and 1870s — partly due to the American Civil War deterring immigration — before accelerating again in the 1880s (22 groups), the peak decade of German immigration to the United States.

The 1900s and 1910s (25 and 24 groups) represent a second major wave, later than the classic German immigration period and including a higher proportion of families from eastern regions and non-German backgrounds. The post-World War II period accounts for 6 documented groups — families who emigrated from Germany in the 1950s under very different circumstances than their predecessors.

Beyond the United States

Not all Dillman families went to the United States, and the database documents this diversity clearly. Canada (16 mentions) is the second most common destination overall — some families arriving directly, others migrating north from American communities after initial settlement. Brazil (2 groups), Mexico (2), Panama (2), South Africa (1), and Australia (2) appear in the database, reflecting the genuinely global reach of German emigration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Several family groups document families that moved through multiple countries before reaching their final destination, with the geographic coverage fields tracing paths that span decades and continents.

A Map of Movement

What the database shows, taken as a whole, is not a single Dillman migration but dozens of overlapping ones: families from the same Rhenish village arriving at the same New York pier in the same decade, knowing nothing of each other; families from distant Hessian towns converging on the same St. Louis neighborhood for reasons that had everything to do with the shape of nineteenth-century immigration networks and nothing to do with family connection. The surname linked them on paper; the geography explains why they ended up where they did.

For researchers tracing a specific Dillman line, this settlement map offers a practical guide: if your ancestor arrived in the 1850s and settled in the Midwest, look to Baden or Hesse for origins. If the family appears in California before 1880, consider Alsatian or French connections. If the line runs through Pennsylvania to the colonial period, the DFA’s oldest family groups — and the dense genealogical records of German Pennsylvania — are where the search should focus.

The Dillman families spread across a continent and, in some cases, across several continents. The database makes it possible to see, for the first time, the full shape of that dispersal.

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.
2. Shults, A. B., Artist. Immigrants landing at Castle Garden / drawn by A.B. Shults. United States, New York, 1880. Photograph. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. https://www.loc.gov/item/90707732/. Featured image.
3. OwenBlacker. “Alsace Lorraine Departments Evolution Map.” Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0. commons.wikimedia.org. Inline image, “The Alsatian Borderland” section.