Pompo and Our Rhineland Roßmanns

My mother's father's name was Rossman William Smith, Sr. He was the original Pompo. Two of my brothers and I have adopted Pompo as the name our grandkids call us.

Pompo's first name, Rossman, was a family surname, though it worked nicely as a first name as well.

Here is a photo of the Rossman family. This family was entirely German, unlike most of my family's ancestors, who trace to Britain.

Left to right: Elizabeth, b. 1858 (only part of her shows up in the photo); Mary, b. 1848; William (my Pompo's namesake), b. 1866; John, Sr., b. 1819; John, Jr. b. 1861; Catherine Rossman nee Davis (she was a first generation German immigrant,) b. 1824;
and Martha Rosella Underwood nee Rossman, b. 1856.

Not only were the original Rossmans German, they were specifically from a place then called the Electoral Palatinate of the Rhine. 

<-- Here is the flag of the Palatinate.

The Rossman family emigrated from the Palatinate in the early 1700s, along with several hundred other families. The emigrants were called "the Palatines." They left because the French were making things pretty miserable for them. (This was back when the French still knew how to fight wars.)

The Palatines all tried to emigrate to Britain, but the Brits had other ideas, and shipped most of them to the colonies.

Our Palatine ancestor's name was Johannes Roßmann, b. 1677. (The ß is pronounced approximately as "sch" as in the word "mensch.") Within a couple generations, the name was Anglicized to Rossman.

Johannes was the 2nd great-grandfather of John Rossman, Sr., who is the dad in the family photo above.

John Sr.'s daughter Martha Rosella Rossman Underwood was the mother of Mertie Belle (Underwood) Smith, who was the mother of Rossman William Smith, Sr. I will do a separate post on Mertie Belle.