Welcome!


Discovering the Kolthammer family history and composing this website are works in progress. The events gathered here will not provide a complete picture of any one person, just tidbits from their lives, depending on what has been discovered so far. The internet is a perfect location for this study - accessible to far-flung cousins and easy to update with newly discovered material. You can contribute by letting other family members know about this project and contacting me with stories, photos, and documents. As well, please let me know of errors or typos on these pages.

 

Finding a person on the site

Find someone via the surname index, the charts, or the search tab, all accessible from the top menu.

There is an individual page for each person for whom I have a reasonable amount of information, which is arranged as follows:

  • Name and birth/death dates
  • Parents' names
  • Relationship, if any, to Friedrich Wilhelm Kolthammer (1856-1906) who emigrated from Germany to England
  • An "Extended Family" button which opens up a diagram of the subject's siblings, children, parents, grandparents, and great grandparents
  • Links to charts on which they appear
  • Family section, listing known children
  • The main section - a chronology of life events
  • Source citations
  • A link to contact me with information, photos, corrections, or just to let me know you are interested!

 

Other areas to Explore

From the top menu you can also connect to

  • Surname Index - lists everyone who has their own information page
  • Charts - illustrate ancestries and descendancies of key people
  • Maps -
  • Calendars - just for fun...birthdays and marriages of people on this site
  • Images - thumbnails linking to larger images on individual's pages
  • Search - finds any person on this website

 

Spelling

Spelling variations often occurred at the whim of the recorder and are inconsequential. A name may even be spelled different ways within one document. Kolthammer has been found as Kolthamer, Colthammer, Coldhammer, Kalthammer, and so on. Especially in early German records, spelling was not standardized and some letters are used interchangeably, e.g. d for t or dt, e for a, i for y, v for w. So Diedrich = Dietrich, Kobold = Koboldt, Margarethe = Margaretha, Meier = Meyer, Ludvig = Ludwig, and so on.  Forenames for some people exist in German and English forms, e.g. Wilhelm and William, as well as nicknames, e.g. Fritz for Friedrich. Often the first generation leaving Germany began life with a German name at birth or baptism and altered it to the English equivalent. Indexes can introduce strange spellings, usually due to difficulty interpreting handwriting. Notes for a given document will indicate if the name was recorded differently than expected.

There are several online sources to see old German script. Here are examples of lower case and upper case letters similar to those used in the church records.

 

Odds & ends

There are no details about living people but their names only may appear as a child in the family section of their parents.

Anything in [square brackets] is an explanatory note that I have added.

The information displayed on these pages will necessarily change as the research continues and this site is updated. Although great care has been taken, I do not guarantee the accuracy of all information on this website.  My knowledge of German and the early church records is rudimentary so there may well be errors in interpretation.

By checking the citations, you can see where a particular piece of information was found and evaluate how likely it is to be correct. For instance, a date of birth from a birth certificate is more reliable than one from a census or a death certificate. I have not cited every source that supports a fact...there might be four secondary records that say a person was born in London but I typically don't cite them all.

If you are using any of the information presented on this site for your own genealogical research, please remember to cite accordingly.  Something along the lines of "Kolthammer Genealogy, online, http://genealogy.kolthammer.org/Kolthammer/, accessed date" would be suitable. Even better, look up the original sources or contact me for a copy from my files.

If you would like to hear about updates to this site, just ask.

 

Acknowledgements

  • Jean Heselden for her detailed work on FW Kolthammer/Cuthbertson, William Cuthbertsen for his assistance making the leap to Germany, and numerous other correspondents over the years, many of whom appear in the citations
  • The developers and supportive user community of The Master Genealogist and Second Site, programs which were used to produce this site.