I am going to start listing my ancestral surnames in hopes that some people might come across my post and start a conversation.

My own surname is Dardinger which is a shortened form of a Swiss-German surname Darendinger.  My gggrandfather, Stephen arrived in the US in 1858 on the ship William Tell and the family moved first to Licking County, Ohio and then on west to Hardin County Ohio where he and his wife Mary Ann and some of their children lived the rest of their lives.  My own ggrandfather, Samuel moved to Franklin County, Ohio and many still live there to this day.  I happened to move to Tempe, Arizona about 19 years ago.  There were two other Darendingers who moved to the US changing their names to Dardinger as well, but both of them daughtered out eventually and the only lines which still carry the Dardinger name were from Samuel and his brother John Henry Dardinger.  The most recent generation contains several Dardingers from Samuel’s line and one from Henry’s.  As best I can figure things, the Darendingers came from the town of Darendingen, a suburb of Solothurn, Solothurn, Switzerland.  This means they might not be all relatives, but I expect the three families which took Dardinger as a shortened surname were related.  One of them was also headed by a Stephen and settled in the Wheeling, WV area.  The other one was headed by a Jacob and was already in Hardin County, Ohio when my Stephen arrived.  Stephen’s oldest child was also a Jacob, so it’s hard to beleve they weren’t closely related.  I suspect they were brothers with a father Jacob (as the Jacob was older than Stephen), but that’s a guess.

So far I  haven’t found the family in Switzerland, but there are lots of church and canton records which haven’t been put on line yet, so it could still happen.  I am of course interested in any information a reader of this blogpost might come across.