KLEYLEIN Immigration Trail

Time for another immigration trail! Last time it was DOMELLE, today it will be KLEYLEIN. I am nothing if not blessed with unusual surnames. When I was growing up I used to wish my name was nice and simple, like "Lisa Smith". Of course, silly me, once I started doing genealogy all of a sudden I appreciated the fact that I had these ridiculously rare names to search on!

Anyhoo! Here is the Immigration Trail of my direct line of KLEYLEIN ancestors going as far back as I know, and ending with the birthplace and childhood home of my grandfather, Leon:

Unterrodach, Oberfranken, Bayern, Germany-->(via port of Bremen, Germany and port of Baltimore, MD)-->Baltimore, Maryland

Yep, that's it! Two places. I can see that my urge to constantly move doesn't come from this particular line!

Couple notes here:

1. Bremen is the same port that my DOMELLE ancestor departed from, but there was a 22 year space in between. My great-grandfather sailed on the Donau.

2. What you can't tell from the immigration trail itself is that we have records going back to the late 1700s showing KLEYLEINs living in the town of Unterrodach in Germany. It fact the tiny town was actually teeming with them to the point that people starting slapping additional descriptors onto their last names. We were the KLEYLEIN-WELTDICKER. Just bask in the wonderfulness of that name for a second! I just may change my name to add the descriptor...

So anyway my great-grandfather Peter KLEYLEIN, at age 16, the youngest of 8 siblings, left his hometown to journey to Baltimore Maryland in 1889. His older brother John had already lived in Baltimore for a few years.

Unterrodach was a logging town. This picture from google earth shows large swaths of forest that still exist in the region, thank goodness:


And so ends my immigration trail for today. I promise future one's will have more than 2 places (I have lots of old-timey New Englanders to work on next).