[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Name Translation by Reiner

[Günther Böhm]

Evert Moes schrieb:

>Be carefull when making generalizations!  I found a family of 12 children in
>my family, where two of the girls, No. 8 and 9 in the sequence of the
>children, were called Amalie and Emilie respectively.  And there was no
>Polish background in the family at all!  In effect, the family lived in
>Germany near the Belgian border in Monschau!
>
Hello Evert,
you are right and perhaps it should be explained where the names Emil & 
Emilie really came from.
They have neither a Roman (Aemilius) nor a catholic (Saint Emil 
/Aemilius of Cogolla) nor a Polish background but a French and thus a 
revolutionary one!
In 1762, Jean Jacques Rousseau published his novel "Émile ou 
l'education" about an ideal example of free education. Especially during 
and after the Napoleonic period, this novel found a huge publicity all 
over Europe. And when a child was named Emil or Emilie, you can be 
absolutely sure that his parents had read this novel, loved it and 
wanted their child to grow up as free as Rousseau's Émile.

Emil was the first name of one of my ggrandfathers and two of my 
granduncles.

Guenther