106 Wenger, Wanger, Winger, Wingert--you may be one too!

My grandfather was only 16 and living on a farm in Montgomery County, Ohio, when his widowed mother died. Consequently, her surname, Wenger, wasn’t in my consciousness until I took a mild interest in genealogy. Once I learned to look for Wenger, I noticed a huge book (over 1200 pages) at a used book store, “The Wenger Book; a foundation book of American Wengers,” Samuel S. Wenger, Ed. (Pennsylvania German Heritage History, Inc., 1978). So I bought it. The book chronicles the descendants of one Christian Wenger who arrived in the United States from Switzerland in 1727 with his wife Eve Graybill (Kraybill, Krabill). I think by 1900 they had about 200,000 descendants, but as many of them as there were, they are not my Wengers.

My Wengers are descended from Hans and Hannah according to "Hans and Hannah Wenger, North American Descendants," a four volume work by Daniel L. Wenger. They didn’t come to this country until 1749, but they were also Mennonites. This information is available on CD and an on-line database which makes it easy to search.

Three of their sons and Hannah immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1748 and 1749. Hans apparently died shortly before the trip. Their descendants have spread across the country and the world. Many other families are also included in the database, including other Wenger lines, in particular many descendants of Christian Wenger, immigrant of 1727 (of the book I can‘t use). There are over 100,000 names of individuals who are not connected to the Hans and Hannah Wenger family. These names (like my father’s parents) were collected in order to assist in identifying possible other ancestors of Wenger descendants and possible other Wenger descendants.

The DLW genealogy database contains over 232,000 names (last updated Oct. 1, 2002) of individuals, mostly descended from 18th century Mennonites, River Brethren (Brethren in Christ) and German Baptist Brethren (Church of the Brethren) who settled in Lancaster, Lebanon and Franklin Counties, Pennsylvania, in Ontario, Canada and in Washington County, Maryland and Botetourt County, Virginia. In the 1800s a number of the families moved to Darke County and Montgomery County, Ohio and to Iowa, Indiana and Kansas. In the early 1900s there was continued migration to Upland and Modesto, California.

The database can be searched at RootsWeb. If you are a descendant of Hans and Hannah and known to the author, you will have a unique number in this database. And that would make us cousins.