Data compiled from Dillman Family Association Family Group Fact Sheets. This analysis covers 199 confirmed family groups (Groups 1–200, with confirmed gaps at Groups 46, 105, 129, and 196, and Group 197 consolidated into Group 190; Groups 201–204 are tentative duplicate placeholders pending a numbering-conflict investigation and are excluded here) — the full dataset following the most recent expansion.

Part Two drew a statistical portrait of the Dillman surname from 160 documented Family Groups. Thirty-nine more groups have since been added, bringing the total to 199. This article revisits Part Two’s findings against the fuller dataset — and this time, two of the headline claims don’t just shift at the margins. They flip outright.

Two Reversals

Part Two called 1848–1859 — the years of the Revolutions of 1848 — the single largest immigration window in the dataset, with 21 groups. That claim no longer holds. The 1880–1899 conscription era now leads with 31 groups, against 23 for 1848–1859. Both periods grew as new groups were added, but 1880–1899 grew faster: eight of the sheets added since Part Two trace to families leaving in the two decades after German unification, against just two landing in the 1848 window. The underlying story hasn’t changed — young men avoiding universal military conscription after 1871 remains the best-documented driver of this era — but its place in the ranking has.

The second reversal is more direct. Part Two stated flatly that the dataset showed a complete absence of new arrivals between 1930 and 1945. That is no longer true, for two distinct reasons. First, an oversight: Group 139 (the Sternbach family of Vienna, Austria, who fled the Anschluss in 1939 and anglicized their name to Stanford) was already in Part Two’s 160-group dataset^[1] — its 1939 arrival was simply missed, the same kind of oversight Part Two itself caught and corrected from Part One (Group 94’s colonial arrival). Second, a genuine addition: Group 166, Arthur Frank Delmaine, a WWI veteran turned merchant seaman who was “definitively residing in the US” by his April 1942 draft registration, is one of the newly submitted family sheets.^[2] Between them, the 1930–1945 window now shows two arrivals instead of zero.

Two claims from Part Two didn’t just need updating — they needed reversing. That’s a useful reminder for anyone citing a “largest” or “only” finding from an in-progress dataset: the ranking is a snapshot, not a fact about the Dillman surname.

The Decade Picture, Rebuilt

155 of the 199 groups have a determinable immigration decade — a stricter share than Part Two’s 134 of 160, reflecting a more conservative standard applied this round: dates attached only to a census year, a naturalization filing, or a passport application (with no distinct stated arrival year) are now excluded rather than estimated. A handful of previously-counted groups dropped out of the decade count for exactly this reason.

155 of 199 groups have a parseable immigration decade. © Dillman Family Association 2026.

Beyond the two reversals above, the rest of the picture holds up well. The Russian-German cluster still dominates the 1900–1913 pre-WWI window (16 of 28 groups in that period), still traceable to the same 1874 Universal Conscription Act ending Russia’s promised military exemption for the Volga colonies.^[3] Colonial-era arrivals — predating American independence — now number seven, up from six: Group 171, Friederich Dielmann of Philadelphia, arrived in 1755, the same year as Group 3, and was simply among the newly submitted sheets rather than a prior oversight.^[4] All seven colonial arrivals landed in Philadelphia.

Where They Settled

New York remains the dominant destination by a wide margin. Pennsylvania, California, and Ohio round out the next tier — California’s rise from fifth place in Part Two to a clear second reflects several of the newly added groups’ Pacific-coast settlement, including two family groups that passed through Canada before landing there.

Eighteen of the 199 groups have a documented Canadian connection. Sorting genuine settlement from a passing mention took a closer read than a simple keyword count: a Geographic Coverage entry showing “Canada (1905–1913)” can mean either a real multi-year residence or the interval between landing at a Canadian port and finishing paperwork to cross into the US. Reading each of the eighteen narratives individually, fourteen represent genuine primary settlement in Canada — Saskatchewan (4), Ontario (3), Nova Scotia (2), Quebec (2), British Columbia (1), Manitoba (1), and one group whose specific province isn’t stated. The remaining four (Groups 2, 30, 73, and 148) mention a Canadian branch — typically one descendant, one generation removed — while the immigrating ancestor’s own documented settlement is in the US.

The prairie provinces still tell the clearest single story: every Saskatchewan and Manitoba settlement in the dataset is a Volga-Saratov Russian-German family, the same conscription-driven migration as the pre-WWI American peak, landing on the Canadian side of the border instead. The Nova Scotia pair (Groups 2, subgroup A, and 18) are the same eighteenth-century Hessian-soldier story identified in Part Two.^[5]

The Spellings, Refined

Part Two found Dillmann dominant at 77 of 160 groups (48.1%), with Dielmann second at 17 (10.6%) and Dillman third at 14 (8.8%). Applying the same one-spelling-per-group method to the full 199 produces an almost identical picture at the top: Dillmann still leads at 94 groups (48.0%), Dielmann holds second at 23 (11.7%), and Dillman sits at 16 (8.2%). The proportions barely moved — a sign the naming picture is genuinely stable, not just under-sampled.

What did move is the tail. The dataset now documents 36 distinct primary spellings, up from 25 — and unlike the Diehlmann shift Part Two flagged (a genuine German-line variant growing in share), most of the eleven new spellings arrived from families entirely outside the German-surname tradition: Dilimone (Sicily, Italy), Delmaine (Lancashire, England), Dittmar (Netherlands), Delemyn (New York/Netherlands), Gilman (Russia, Jewish family), and several others. The core Dillmann/Dielmann/Dillman/Diehlmann lineage hasn’t diversified — the newer families extending the dataset’s reach have.

DNA: Still Stalled

Twenty-one of the 199 documented groups participate in the Dillman DNA Project — the identical count reported in both Part One (94 groups) and Part Two (160 groups). The raw number has now held flat across three expansions and 105 additional family groups. The share has fallen accordingly: from 22.3% in Part One, to 13.1% in Part Two, to 10.6% now.

Not one of the 39 groups added since Part Two has a DNA project participant. The pattern Part Two called out — that documentary growth and DNA participation have completely decoupled — has now held for two consecutive expansions in a row. At least twelve genetically distinct Dillman lines are already confirmed by Y-DNA and autosomal testing, with no single common ancestor connecting them;^[6] as the documented population keeps growing while the tested population doesn’t, that finding becomes harder for individual researchers to act on, not easier. Members of any of the 39 newest groups are particularly well positioned to change that.

Jewish and Hebrew Families: Nine Stories, Not Eight

Part Two identified eight Family Groups of Jewish or Hebrew origin: two Litin, Ukraine families (Groups 20 and 52), and individual groups from Romania (42), Palestine (82), Belarus (86), Odessa (131), Belarus again (149), and Vienna (139, the Anschluss-era refugee story described above). Re-checking all 199 groups by the same standard Part Two used — names and geography read in context, not a literal keyword search, since terms like “Jewish” or “Hebrew” rarely appear verbatim on the source sheets — confirms all eight and adds one more.

Group 178, Sam Gillman (born Schulem Gilman) of New York and Russia, is explicitly documented on its own source sheet as a Jewish family who appears in the census as coming from Russia; he worked in the clothing trade.^[7] It fits the same broad pattern as the earlier Litin and Odessa families: emigration from the Pale of Settlement region in the early twentieth century, the same decades and the same documented waves of anti-Jewish pogroms that drove an estimated three million Jews out of the Russian Empire between 1881 and 1917.^[8]

A Living Dataset, Still Growing

The 199 groups analyzed here aren’t the final picture either. The pattern from Part One to Part Two to now continues to hold: the core findings mostly stay intact, and the real value keeps showing up in the margins — a reversed ranking, a filled-in gap, a ninth Jewish family, a colonial arrival nobody had flagged. A documentation project this size now behaves like a genuine historical dataset, the kind where adding more data changes not just the numbers but which questions are 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 139 — Alfred Dillmann (Sternbach/Stanford family) of Dixon, Illinois and Vienna, Austria.
2. Dillman Family Association, Family Group Fact Sheet, Group 166 — Arthur Frank Delmaine of New York and Everton, Lancashire, England.
3. “Migration,” Volga German Institute; “Immigration 1875–1924,” Norka, Russia, citing research by Dr. Igor Pleve (accessed July 2026).
4. Dillman Family Association, Family Group Fact Sheet, Group 171 — Friederich Dielmann of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Hadamar, Hesse, Germany.
5. Dillman Family Association, Family Group Fact Sheets, Groups 2 (subgroup A), 18, 37, 53, 54, 57, 80, 81, 85, 97, 181, 195 (various dates).
6. Dillman Family Association, Dillman DNA Project, dillmanfamilyassociation.org/dillman-dna-project/ (accessed July 2026).
7. Dillman Family Association, Family Group Fact Sheet, Group 178 — Sam Gillman of New York and Russia.
8. “The Pale of Settlement,” Jewish Virtual Library (accessed July 2026).
9. Dillman Family Association, “What the Numbers Tell Us, Part Two: 160 Groups,” dillmanfamilyassociation.org (published July 2026).
10. Dillman Family Association, Family Group Fact Sheets, Groups 164–200 (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 199 confirmed groups documented to date (excluding four tentative placeholder entries pending a numbering-conflict investigation) 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.