This is the story of the Thiede family and all of their known descendants. It is incomplete at the present time. In fact, family histories are never complete. There is always one more bit of information to add. One more birth, one more death, one more marriage or one more ancestor needs to be added. It is a never ending job to find these people or pick up their trail in old records. Many hours were spent looking at old parish records and in court houses to find the information contained here and many more hours need to be spent finding more information.

The format of this history is called "Register Style" and was used by the New England Historic Genealogical Society. In this the original ancestor is given the number 1. and all of his children are given Roman numerals in order of their birth. If any of his children married and had children they are also given another number like 2. and so on. When you see a child with both of these numbers in front of their name this tells you that you must go to the next generation to find out about his wife and children. This system sounds complicated at first but after you try it out for a while it will make more sense. If not, there is an alphabetical index in the back to find the person you are looking for. There are plenty of links to go from one gereration to the othere to follow a particular line through history forwards or backwards.

Many thanks to all of the people who have given their time and effort into helping me with this project and especially the information they gave. Remember if you see something you think is wrong or you have more information to give please contact me. It is never to late.

The earliest records, I have studied, list the Thiede family living in or near Parchim in Mecklenburg. This originally was in independent state and became part of the German Empire in 1870. Parchim church records for baptism, marriage and death go back to 1651. All of these records have not, as yet, been searched. The older the record the harder it is to read. These is also a time element involved. There are a number of Thiede families that lived in Parchim and it is not known if they are related. There are two churches in Parchim, St. Georg and St. Marien, most of the Thiede families belong to St. Georg but our branch are in St. Marien. I do not know if this means anything or if it just happened that they lived within the other parish's boundary. We can trace their movement from Parchim to Wulfsahl, to Marlaw in Mecklenburg and then to the Burlington, Wisconsin area.

Why did they come to American and then to Burlington? This may never be know to our satisfaction. At this time thousands of Germans were coming to America every year. In 1884, when the Thiedes came over more than 149,000 other Germans left for the U.S. and from 1880 to 1889, 1,445,181 Germans immigrated to the U.S. This country was the land of opportunity and hope and cheap land. German was overpopulated and many people were to poor to make a decent living for themselves and their families. Why did they come to Burlington? They had relatives there. John Hinzpeter had come to Burlington in 1869. He was August Thiede's uncle. His mother's brother and that is probably the reason in this case..

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