Preliminary Numbers

The purpose of this blog is to report on the Beismer One Name Study.

There is also information about the families on the NYFamilyTracker blog.  There is information about the Study and individual profiles of each person identified in the Study @ WikiTree.

But this blog will be the place where details about the Study will be recorded.  As a blog, each post will make it possible to follow the Study chronologically, as it progresses.  The following statistics will change as more people are added to the Study.

This is a preliminary report as of this date:  There are currently 123 individuals who have been found or added to WikiTree for the Study.  This includes:  46 female individuals and 77 male individuals.  

Those individuals have the following surname variants:  Beasimer (2); Beesimer (10); Beesmer (4); Beesmyr (1); Beismer (23); Besemer (38); Besmer (3); Biesemeier (24); Biesemeyer (8); Biesmer (3); Bismer (2) and 4 spouses with different birth names.  It's clear, in some cases, that the variants exist because spelling rules didn't exist until modern education and because many people were not always able to read or write.

These 123 individuals were born, lived and/or died in: The United States, Germany, Hungary, Austria, The Netherlands, The Holy Roman Empire and Yugoslavia.

In the United States, so far, people in the Study lived in: New York, Kansas, Michigan, California, ILlinois, Missouri, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

I've created a database and spreadsheet for the Study in order to compile these statistics.  I haven't yet added all the individuals identified and profiled @ WikiTree to either the database or the spreadsheet.  I'm working on that now.  In addition to the statistics listed here, I'm also collecting marital status and number of children.  I'll be able to report on those stats once I get the existing individuals all added to the spreadsheet.

In response to a question about a Dutch genealogy site (I don't read Dutch), I confirmed something I was told a long time ago:  Besem, is the Dutch word for broom; pronounced Bees em or Bees um.  Bees mer, regardless of spelling, means, more or less, person who uses a broom (my paraphrasing)

Within my own family, within a family cemetery, there are, in three generations, three different spellings of the surname, but, the pronunciation has been Bees mer or Bees eh mer.  It's the pronunciation that I'm using to distinguish among all the variant spellings.  Some of the variants may not conform to that pronunciation which may mean that the origin of the name, and possibly the family, is different.

The proof, of course, that these variants are related is in finding actual familial/genealogical connections.  It's difficult to tell, at this point, if that will be possible.

Until next time...