Grimm

Some comments on the origin of the Grimm name were posted on a Grimm family forum on Rootsweb:

“The name Grim originated from the Scandinavian surname “Grym” meaning fierce (In the British and Welsh languages of the period “Grym” signifies strength and may be the derivation of Graham). ….. The family had long been seated in Normandy, tracing its ancestry back to the Norsemen who made conquest to the south of their country in the tenth century, and family tradition says that the parent stem of the Grim family insofar as the Grims of Germany are concerned originated with the Norseman raider GRYM. From the 8th to the 13th century, Norse sea rovers made raids on the settlements on the coast of Europe. In 787 they began their raids on England and France.

The family of Grim is descended from a Norse raider named Grym who settled in Normandy in the 10th century. A coat of arms was granted to the Baron of Normandy who was a Grim serving under William the Conquerer. He came down from Scandinavia with Rudolph, a Norseman. From Normandy the Grims migrated to Alsace and Switzerland and with the persecution of the Protestants, went to Germany – to a region known as the Palatine – the part of Germany that ran along the border with France. Conditions in Germany in the 17th and 18th centuries were chaotic due to constant wars among the different princes and states and brutal religious persecution by the state churches, both Catholic and Reformed.”

To learn about the life of Magdalena Grimm Kieber, the immigrant who journeyed to NY state from Alsace, please click on her name.

Great-great grandfather, Georges ‘Michel” Grimm, a stone mason, was born in 1822, in Oberotterbach, Südliche Weinstraße, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, near the Alsatian border town of Wissembourg.

For the story of third great Grandfather, Georg Ludwig Grimm, the pauper who died in the sanitoria in Frankenthal, please click on his name.

We are still searching for Ludwig’s wife, Elizabeth, who emigrated to America in 1866, probably with her daughters, Susanna Margarethe, and Philippine. If you have any further information, please write to me or post in the comments box below.

And, as far as any relation to the famous “Brothers Grimm”  Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859), there is none that we know of at this time! However, Doerrenbach, where third great-grandfather, Georg Ludwig was born, and home to our ancestral Grimms, for who knows how long, is a magical German village worth a visit! Some even say Doerrenbach is where the Sleeping Beauty legend originated.