It happens in small villages that specific family names occur very often. This is also the case for Erbstadt, located in the region called Wetterau. Here, "Stoerkel" is such a name. Even if times have changed in the last years and there had been certain fluctuations in small villages - there are still many people in Erbstadt who have this name in their family tree and there are many Stoerkels who actually don´t live there anymore but consider it as their home.
My name is Uli Stoerkel, my father´s family lives "since ever" in Erbstadt and I grew up there as well. This website is my attempt to disclose the history of the Stoerkel family and to describe the relations between today´s families. I am an absolute layman in history and reading hand written stuff in old-style letters is still difficult for me. Therefore, the family tree shown here does not claim to be perfectly correct. I am grateful for each hint which helps to optimize it.
If I remember correctly, I had asked myself as a child the question if and how I would be related with all the other people with my family name. But even my grandma Magdalene, who knew everyone in the village very well, would not have been able to answer this.
The motivation to start ancestry research was triggered just two years ago by some "cousins" from the US. Before that, in the 1980s, an American had written a letter to the priest of our village and had asked him to find relatives to his ancestors who had left the village at about 1835. And he and his wife came for a visit. I could not understand the shouting and cheering of my dad and "uncle" Bob when they had figured out that their family trees matched. But 30 years later, when Bob´s daughter Barbara and his niece Laura put their family tree in front of my eyes, I got the bug. I was fascinated and I was curious about the fact that five out of seven siblings took off to America almost 200 years ago.
Means, I started with the question about my relationship to people in Indiana, Arizona and New York City. By doing that I started also to ask myself about my relationship to people who I knew since childhood but who seemed to have the same family name in a more or less accidental manner.