ROOTS & BRANCHES

A couple of year ago I had the honor of being the guest speaker for the 2022 Dillman Genealogical Conference and was impressed by the sponsoring organization, the Dillman Family Association.

It was one of the relatively few instances in which I’ve given in-person presentations since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and maybe that’s the reason I didn’t realize that I’d left behind my laptop computer until it was too late to retrieve it, which meant I needed to lecture without a PowerPoint.

As it turned, out, the lecture went well—it was one I had given many times before—but there was another unique facet to the day: One of the most involved Dillman descendants was named Stillman.

At first I really didn’t pay attention to that—figuring that G. Andrew Stillman was simply descendant of a maternal family that married into a Dillman family.

But … not so fast: What actually happened was that Dillman went to Canada and after the American Revolution became a Stillman.

That’s one of the many stories related in the new book Discovering Dillman Families Throughout the World (Lulu Press Inc., 248 pages) that the Dillman Family Association has recently published.

The book is the result of more than 20 years of research that started in earnest with a get-together over two days in Indianapolis in 2022.

During these last two decades, research ranging from trips to DNA testing has assembled many of the Dillman families into blood groups, but brought them all together as “cousins by choice” sharing a lineage from a surname with a large number of spelling variants—everything from the most popular spellings of Dillman and Dillmann (covering more than two thirds of the families documented) to more niche variants such as Dielmann, Dieleman, Dilman, Dielman, Delmon, Dihlmann, Dillemann, Deelman, Tihlmany, and many more.

(Of interest to me is that the Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, Daub family included an immigrant with the first name of Dielmann, although records have been found for him with many of these same spelling variants, proving (if nothing else) that the “translation” of German phonetics into English-language records creates many changes in spelling)

While the Discovering Dillman Families book does include some information on the various Dillman families, its real cache is preserving the narrative of the families of these “cousins by choice” and all the twists and turns (and unraveling of information previously thought to be correct!) that they have gone through.

It’s also poignant to see that some of the original founders of the group have now passed on, making it even more vital to tell the story now—even though none of them think of their journey as finished (there’s a reunion scheduled for this August in Kentucky!)

In the meantime, the book is available for purchase on the Dillman Family Association website at the URL, https://dillmanfamilyassociation.org/