Jewish Zollinger
Largely from the immigration records of Ellis Island, there are some six Jewish families who arrived in the USA. Their ethnic background can with some certainty be established by the names: Abraham, Moses Rachel, Levi, Nathan, Joseph and David. Their origins are somewhat uncertain, as immigration officials were not versed in Eastern European geography, and the boundaries and country names kept changing. The origins are variously given as Prussia, Poland, Russia and Austria. This latter is particularly difficult, as the Austrian-Hungarian empire covered parts of today's Serbia, Rumania, Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
As there is only one documented Zollinger family of Jewish background documented, the one from the Secuava region in north-eastern Romania( see above), there is a large question as tot he origine of these families. None could be linked to any branch of the Zollingers. In fact there is a possibility that these immigrants did not carry the name Zollinger, but may well have been adopting the name for language reasons.
These immigrant families then settled in various part of the country, and census figures show them in Massachusetts, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chicago and Denver. In these locales the families can be traced for normally two generations, and then they disappear. With considerable searching through census records, they in fact did not disappear, but they changed the spelling of their names (to make them more in sync with Jewish spellings?). And so there are now a large variety of different spellings, which can not be traced further, as they sometimes change with each generation. Among the many variants are "Zahlinger", "Zalinger", "Solinger" "Sellinger", "Zillinger and "Sillinger", and several more spellings. Because of this variety, and because many of today's persons with such names has a very different ancestry, it has never been possible to locate any of the offspring of these families today.
There are thus a considerable number of relatives living in various part of the USA who can trace their families back to the Zollinger name, but have not been found. And there is the possibility that some of these families may be able to trace their family backgrounds in eastern Europe to a Zollinger ancestor? That type of information would be moist exciting to find At this time, all that remains is the hope that some of these family members are interested in their family history, and by chance find this article, and this website. And then it would be my greatest wish that they contact me, and maybe together we can establish a family tree, and an ancestry.
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