June 19, 2013 at 12:26 pm
Jan Van der Eecken (6/19/2013)
Hehe,I'm born Flemish, in other words Belgian. There the lower case 'v' in 'Van' means you've got some royal blood somewhere, maybe generations ago. So I'm obviously not in that league, I just come from the oak tree. In the Netherlands they don't make that distinction. So they are all kings 🙂
Same was true in Germany and Austria before the abolition of the nobility in 1919. The word "von" roughly translates to "of" or "from". Von with a capital "V" was a nobiliary particle - it indicated that the bearer was of the nobility. When the nobility was abolished, many German nobles just made "von" part of their names. In Austria, even the use of "Von" or "von" in a name was abolished, so former Austrian nobles just dropped it from their names.
Jason Wolfkill
June 19, 2013 at 1:13 pm
Wolf, don't say you are Austrian, or are you? Passport-wise I'm too. Spent my teens in Vienna and a few more years after that.
June 19, 2013 at 2:08 pm
Jan Van der Eecken (6/19/2013)
Wolf, don't say you are Austrian, or are you? Passport-wise I'm too. Spent my teens in Vienna and a few more years after that.
No, my family's from Hesse, but we left there in the 1770s - the time frame may give you a hint as to the destination and how it worked out for Jacob Wolfskehl, my ancestor (pretty well, in the end, after a pretty rocky start).
Jason Wolfkill
June 19, 2013 at 2:40 pm
I never knew you were descended from mercenaries.
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June 19, 2013 at 2:44 pm
So I got the idea right. Anyhow, that's beside the OP's question 🙂
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