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After my father in 1998 stumbled upon a hand-drawn family by my late grandfather Fritz Herrendörfer, I caught the bug of tracing back my family line. I have been engaged in this work since then off and on and have found many interesting things. I wrote a letter to all 70 people in the german phonebook with the last name HERRENDOERFER or similar spelling, like Herrendörfer, Herrendorf, Herrendorff etc. A response of about 10% of those has been most helpful in my research and has led me to be able to trace the family back 11 generations. In that I found out that the family originated in Salzburg, Austria, where they were part of a minorty group of protestants in a mostly catholic environment. The protestants were expelled from the area, having to leave behind all their wealth, farms, animals, property of any and all kind and they started their march north through germany and eventually those protestant migrants were settled in EAST PRUSSIA. During this time the family changed their name from DOERFERER to HERRENDOERFER. The letter combination
OE in German is also spelled 'ö' and is considered to be the same. Another thing i found is that at least one family emigrated in the 1800s to America also I have not found the ship name etc. But they show up for example in the 1870 census in Minessota i believe. Also, 1 or 2 individuals, one called Friedrich Herrendoerfer was part of the British German Legion and must have thus made it to Africa, and there is now a Herrendoerfer family in South Africa also! If you have any information on this family, please contact me at katja_herrend@hotmail.com
Katja Herrendoerfer Zarco
born in Berlin, Germany 1976
married to Maz Zarco in 2003
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