Posted on Facebook on 22 April 2016.

Last week I have added to my webpage the 6000th Weissenborn, whom I took from the 1950 address book of Erfurt that I found on the internet.

Three years ago I started to assemble all genealogical information on all Weissenborns around the globe throughout time – that is in practice since 1600, when the churches started to keep registers of the common people –. At the time I estimated that their number would be some 10,000. I had no hard clues to go by, and the wish was the father of the thought: I thought and hoped that I would be up to the task of keying in some 10,000 names, dates of birth and death, profession, dates on whereabouts and when applicable the date of marriage and dates of the partner. I expected that the result would in itself be rewarding and spur me on. And so it has.

Now that I am receiving praise and encouragement for my webpage, I am sure I will continue until the job is done, as far as it can be done. The job includes research in the archives, which may have to wait until my retirement. According to my own estimate, the job is already more than halfway done.

My 10,000 estimate included the Wittenborns. I knew from my own family history that the names Weissenborns and Wittenborn mean exactly the same and were still used in the 18th century for and by the same persons north and south of the “Lautverschiebung”, the sound shift, which runs east-west just north of Kassel and passes over the village Weißenborn at the spring of the river Garte. So I should add the 900 entries on my webpage with Wittenborns to the 6000 on the Weissenborn webpage. I may someday merge the two pages, but until now it has been rather convenient to keep them separate. So far I have only encountered the change-over in my own family tree.