The Bayerle Family of Dinkelsbühl: Cousins? Ancestors?

How they spelled their name.

The LDS Microfilm records of the Dinkelsbühl Church Books span 9 spools of 35 mm film. I have been working through them backwards in time but when I found that both my Brüstles and Baÿrls came to the city from elsewhere, I intended to put further intensive searching on the back burner. (There were Haselbachers there as early as 1650 and I still need to know more about them.) I have also been interested in trying to understand the various spellings of Baÿrl.  However, the story continues to get more interesting and I am going to need to hang on to there films longer.

Early in my search I found an index of what I understood to be baptisms going back as early as 1568.  This and other indexes appear to have been prepared in the early 1900s because their go extend at least that far forward.  In describing this large baptismal index, I noted that although there were no Bayrls or Bayerls appearing earlier than the family of Joseph Bayerl in 1856, there were some 35 children with similar names, most commonly Bayerle.  Even those disappeared from the baptismal index after 1809. However, as I looked through the actual sacramental entries that were referred to by the indexes, an interesting observation emerged that is relevant to the spelling of the names, and whether the older Bayerle family in Dinkelsbühl might be related to the Baÿrls from Affing.

Even before I looked back to the records of the Bayerle family, I noted that the 20th Century indexer did not follow exactly the spelling of the older priests or record keepers. For example, when I looked at the actual sacremental records of the family of my GG Grandfather Joseph Baÿle, I observed that the spelling of his name was occasionally different than that of the 20^th century indexer!  Indeed, the 19^th century priests occasionally used a diacritical mark over the ÿ of Baÿrl, notably in the first available records of 1856 and 1869. Furthermore, I found the same spelling variations in the actual church records that I found in 20^th Century records! Armed with this information, I searched for records of the older Bayerle family of Dinkelsbühl and noticed the same phenomena.  The index name, that settled in on Bayerle, was usually spelled differently in the original record entry.  In addition to issues discusses elsewhere, several clues are present that are relevant to causes of the spelling variations.

• In the later 1700s (where I am currently searching) at least some of the records are in Latin, in contrast to records after the early 1800s.
  
• The names of female family members are inconsistently written with gender-specific suffixes that were not carried over into the indexed names.  For example, Bayerle would be written as Bayerlein.  Given names were often translated into Latin and suffixes were applied to family names but I do not know what grammatical rules would have applied.
  
• It is possible that the name of a small child of either sex might also have a suffix.  This is not clear to me.

Here is a list of the first entries I encountered. Here is a link to the actual record images.

 

Index	Record	Given Name	Year	Type
Unknown Relationship
	Bayrin	Victoram	c1775	Marriage
	Baÿr	R.D.	1788	Marriage
Bayerle	Baiirle or Baürle	M. Magdalina	1788	Baptism
Bayerle	Baÿrle	Jo. Jacob	1790	Baptism
Bayerle	Bayrle	Jo. Jacob	1791	Baptism
Baierlein	Baierlein	Jo. Georg	1809	Baptism
Bayerle	Baÿerlin	M. Cath. Barb.	1800	Death
Bayrle	Bairle	Jacob	1809	Death
Baierlein	Baierlein	Jo. Georg	1809	Baptism
Bayer?Bauer	Baiirin	Barbara	1809	Death
Bayrin	Baÿrin	Isabella	1810	Death
Bayrle	Baÿrl(in)	Jo. George Karl	1810	Death
not indexed	Baierlein	Catharina	1815	Death
Known Family
	Baÿrl	Joseph	1856	Godfather
	Baÿerl	Joseph	1869	Marr. Witness
	Bayerl	Joseph	1871	Marr. Witness

 

 

In summary, it was common over at least two centuries to use an umlaut/ diacritical mark over the ‘y’ in this family name.  There is a variation in how the name was spelled that is not unexpected in church books with combinations of yr, ÿr, yer, ÿer, ir, and seemingly even iir. This variation might reflect interpretations of pronunciation; peculiarities of the German and Latin alphabets at that time in Dinkelsbühl; alterations resulting from mistranslations of the feminine or perhaps juvenile forms of the name; or factors discussed elsewhere.  Finally, I am much less confident that ancestors or relatives of Joseph and his son Xaver were not living in Dinkelsbühl long before the joining of my Baÿrl and Brüstle families.

Peter Hasselbacher
Oct 31, 2008

 

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