A genealogical database is many things — a record of migration, of occupation, of faith, of survival. But it is also, if you read it carefully, a record of names: the names parents chose for their children, the names that followed families across the Atlantic, and the names that changed shape as German speakers became American citizens. Thirty-nine new family groups have joined the DFA’s Family Group Sheet database since the naming patterns here were first surveyed, bringing the total to 199. The patterns hold up well against the larger set — and the new groups add a few naming traditions that weren’t visible before.

The Dominance of Johann

No given name in the DFA database appears more frequently than Johann. Across both the immigrating ancestors and the farthest-back ancestors documented in the German-speaking family groups, Johann and its cognate Johannes account for 28 recorded individuals — still far more than any other name, and still growing roughly in step with the dataset itself. This is not coincidental. Johann was the dominant male given name in the German-speaking world for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, functioning less as a distinctive personal name than as a standard prefix: Johann Georg, Johann Heinrich, Johann Philipp, Johann Conrad. In many German-speaking communities, the first given name (the Rufname, or call name, by which a person was actually known in daily life) was typically the second name, not the first. A man recorded in a church register as Johann Heinrich Dillmann was likely called Heinrich by his neighbors and family.

This has significant practical implications for researchers. When a family group appears to “lose” a Johann in the American records — when the Johann who emigrated from Hesse in 1855 cannot be found in the 1860 census — the answer is often that he arrived as Johann Heinrich and was enumerated simply as Henry. The name was not lost; it was translated.

The Core Name Set

Beyond Johann, the expanded dataset confirms a compact set of given names that account for the majority of Dillman male ancestors documented from German-speaking origins (148 of the 199 groups). In rough order of frequency:

Georg/George and Heinrich/Henry (20 occurrences each across forms) have both moved up from a clear third-place position into a tie for second, just behind Johann. The characteristic split holds in both cases — Georg and Heinrich in the German-origin records, George and Henry in the American ones — and this remains one of the most consistent and useful anglicization patterns in the database: Heinrich becomes Henry at or shortly after immigration, sometimes within the same family generation, sometimes not until the children are named.

Adam (16 occurrences) has grown the most of any name in the core set, and much of that growth reflects a more careful count this time rather than new families alone: Adam recurs constantly as the second element of a compound name — Georg Adam Dillmann, Jacob Adam Dillmann, Johannes Adam Dillmann — and a number of these compound occurrences were missed in the original tally, which appears to have counted names mainly in the leading position. Given that the Rufname is so often the second element, this undercount is worth flagging on its own terms, and it’s a useful reminder for researchers: don’t stop reading a compound name after the first word.

Conrad (9 occurrences, unchanged) remains the most distinctively Dillman name in the dataset — the name most associated with the surname across multiple unrelated family groups, and the one that has added no new instances despite 39 new groups joining the database. Multiple independent lines trace back to a Conrad, spanning different German states, different immigration periods, and different variant spellings of the surname.

Jakob/Jacob (12 occurrences across forms) and Peter (11) both grew in step with the dataset, continuing to suggest family naming traditions in several lines, particularly those from Baden and the Rhineland. Anton/Anthony (8) and Franz/Francis/Frank (7, unchanged) round out the core male name set.

Anglicization: The Name at the Border

The predictable anglicization of German given names upon immigration to the United States remains one of the most consistent patterns in the database, and the expanded dataset hasn’t changed the translation guide researchers can rely on:

• Johann/Johannes → John (the most common transformation)
• Georg → George
• Heinrich → Henry
• Karl/Carl → Charles
• Jakob → Jacob (often without further change, since the English form is close)
• Ludwig → Louis
• Franz → Francis or Frank
• Philipp → Philip
• Anton → Anthony
• Christoph → Christopher

These translations are not always immediate. In some family groups, the immigrant himself maintained his German name — appearing in naturalization records as Heinrich, for example — while his American-born children used Henry. In others, the transformation happened on the ship manifest or at the point of naturalization. Conrad continues to be the clearest exception: it appears in American records in its German form far more consistently than Heinrich or Georg, likely because it has no obvious Anglo-American cognate. Conrad in an 1870 American census remains a good sign of a first-generation immigrant.

Female Names: A Thinner Record

The database still documents significantly fewer female given names than male, reflecting both the naming conventions of the period and the patrilineal focus of much nineteenth-century genealogical record-keeping. Where female ancestors do appear across the German-speaking groups, the same names dominate as before: Maria (in multiple combinations, including Anna Maria, Marie, and Mary — 21 groups), Katharina/Catherine (16 groups), Elisabeth/Elizabeth (12 groups), and Christine/Christina (5 groups). The anglicization pattern holds here too: Maria becomes Mary, Katharina becomes Catherine, and Christine often survives unchanged.

The French Thread

Twelve of the 199 family groups now trace at least one ancestor’s given name or birthplace to France or Alsace-Lorraine, up from ten in the original 160-group survey. These groups carry a different naming tradition — Jean rather than Johann, Philippe rather than Philipp, Antoine rather than Anton — and several of them sit directly on the German/French naming border in an especially literal way. Group 127, Jean Jacques Diehlmann, was born in Saarbrücken, in German-administered Saarland, yet carries an entirely French given name; Group 44, Jean J. Dillmann, shows the same pattern from Alsace-Lorraine during the period of German administration. A grandfather named Jean becomes a father named Johann becomes a son named John, tracing a family’s path from French-speaking Alsace through German administration to American life, all in three generations of given names.

Beyond German and French

The 39 groups added since the original survey bring naming traditions into the database that didn’t register as threads of their own before, because there simply weren’t enough of them. English surnames and given names now appear across a real cluster of groups — the Tilghmans of Kent and England, Henry Delmer of Durham, Ambrose Delmon of West Sussex, Arthur Frank Delmaine of Lancashire — alongside a Dutch/Netherlands cluster (Deelman, Dieleman, Ditmar, Dellemyn, Dulman, Daelmans) that has grown large enough to be its own naming pool rather than a handful of outliers. Scandinavian given names now appear as well: Kristian Dahlman of Norway, Karl Johan Dahlman and Olaf Dahlmann of Sweden, Olaf Pehrsson Dillman of Finland and Sweden. And at least one group, Felice Dilimone of Marineo, Sicily, brings an Italian naming tradition into the dataset for the first time. None of these is large enough yet to support the kind of pattern analysis the Johann/Georg/Heinrich core supports — but each is a reminder that “Dillman” has never been a single naming tradition wearing one surname. It’s several, sharing a name by coincidence of history as often as by descent.

What the Names Reveal

Taken together, the naming patterns documented across the 199 family groups continue to reveal several things that purely documentary genealogical research sometimes obscures.

First, the German-speaking Dillman families were culturally mainstream in their naming choices — they drew from the same pool of common Lutheran and Catholic names that appeared across the German-speaking world, not from a distinctive regional or family tradition. Researchers looking for a “signature” Dillman name will not find one in the first name; the surname itself is the identifier, and even that identifier now spans German, French, English, Dutch, Scandinavian, and Italian roots.

Second, the consistency of anglicization patterns means that American records can often be connected to German originals with reasonable confidence, even without documentary proof of the same individual, if the name transformation follows the expected pattern and the other evidence is consistent.

Third, the Johann prefix problem is real and widespread, and the Adam undercount in the original survey is a useful case study in exactly the same problem: researchers who cannot find a name in American records should search systematically for every possible name in a compound — not just the first one — a task the DFA’s family group documentation is specifically designed to support.

The names in this database are not decoration. They are data, and in the hands of a careful researcher, they point toward the records that contain the rest of the story.

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.