Origin

            The name Wiedemeier has changed somewhat through the years.   The spelling of German names were  unimportant in the last centuries.  Only the pronounciation was important.  The "i" in meier was very commonly written with a "y".   The spelling of the names was decided by the German church clerks.  The families may have actually spelled their name differently than the church.  Apparently, Albert and Joseph Wiedemeier used the current spelling while they were still in Germany.  Our name is made up of two words.  The first part is Wiede which could have come from Wede which means forest, Weide which means pasture or Wiede which is Meadow.  Meier or Meÿer means farmer.  Therefore, the name could be translated as farmer of the meadow or farmer of the pasture etc.  I have tried to use the church spelling but without the latinization so that others could read the names more easily in this book.

            The earliest I have seen the name used is in the time of 1592 on the Cathedral of St. Mark's  wall in Hanover, Germany.  At that location today there is portrait done in stone relief of a man named Conrad Wiedemeier.  This was the exact spelling.  This man was a knight of the Calenberg order, given a castle in Eldagsen, given a farm in St. Galli, Hanover and several others and a coat of arms.  His family came from ancient Niedersachsen previous to the 15th century  or, in other words, where today the Netherlands exist.   His nobility line is still maintained to the 20th century.  There is a strong likelyhood of this man being an ancestor or at least a distant relative.  This is due to the close  proximity of our earliest known ancestor’s birth town of Dringenberg to Hanover with this ancestor being about 2 generations from this man.  Another evidence is that the earliest ancestor bears the same name as this man, Conrad Wiedemeier.  I have included his family coat of arms within this body of work.

            Along the way I compiled a few other lines of our family.  My thinking was that if you were a Wiedemeier you might be interested in them also.  All together there are 10 generations of Wiedemeiers included in this volume.