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Patty;
I saw your post on the ‘Thome’ board first. I checked your posting history to see if you were still active.
You said that you had found information for Johann Thome that matched information on your John Thoma. That’s because it’s the same person. John Thoma would be the ‘Americanized’ version of Johann Thome. When our ancestors came to the US, the passenger lists and any other documents were written by people who spoke ‘English’. The German given names Johann and Johannes were changed to the English John. The surname Thome would be pronounced Thoh’ mah, so we would write it Thoma. Germans do not have silent e’s at the end of a word. If you told a German that your last name was Thome, he would spell it Thom. One of my immigrants, Wilhelm Jost in Germany, became William Yost in the US.
I was checking the Thome board because of my surname. I have traced my family back to the mid-1700’s, but I haven’t found my immigrant Dom yet. First there’s all of the phonetic spellings: Dome, Dohm, Dolm, Doam, even Doom. In addition, back in the 1600’s, 1700’s and even early 1800’s, people used a style of handwriting called German Gothic. With all of the extra curls and loops, even experts have a hard time deciding whether a name starts with: D, Dh, T or Th. So in early records in the US, I can find ancestors with their surname spelled Tome or Thome.
Hope this helped.
Bobbi
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