The Surname Heckenbach
Before the end of the 14th century, things were on such a small scale that common people in Germany had no need of last names. About that time, however, the population grew, the need for taxation increased, and people began to trade and settle in other places. So the citizens acquired last names. This trend had begun with the wealthier families but now filtered down to the lower classes. These new names came from a man's trade, from some physical characteristic, or from his father's name. There are two explanations of place-names as surnames. Since ours was never a family of lords, it must be that some medieval ancestor of ours, call him Johann, moved from Heckenbach out to a neighboring village. He thus acquired his name. It was a local name, an Eifel name, tied to one geographic location, not one like Miller that could have originated anywhere.
The earliest record I've found was in Frankfurt in 1597, although the spelling was a little different. Church records in the Eifel were kept only after the Reformation, beginning around 1650, but much later in some towns. The books for the town of Heckenbach begin in 1654, but there were no Heckenbachs in it at first, although a couple of families lived there for a time in the 1800s. There are several records from Ahrweiler from the 1600's. By 1720, they were numerous in Niederzissen, Wehr, Ober-and Niederdürenbach, and Niederlützingen, wandering eastward to the Rhine.
Our first direct ancestor shows up in 1735. He moved to Brohl from Niederlützingen and the municipal record states that he was a well-to-do man.
There were other Heckenbachs in a dozen towns in the area. They may have been distant relatives of this one, or descendants of others who had wandered out of the village of Heckenbach years earlier. They have dispersed ever since, even though originating at one point.
In 1977 I found 26 Heckenbachs listed in the Rhineland's telephone directories. There are others in scattered parts of Germany. For most of them, any kinship with us would evidently go back very far, and be impossible to prove, although I have found some more closely related. Christian and John Adam were the ancestors of about 50 Heckenbach households in the US today.
There have been a few others as well. There was a Daniel Heckenbach in the 1900 US Census from Pennsylvania. Karl Heckenbach, from Linz, migrated to America in the early 1900s. There have been at least two others in more recent decades.