Infographic Is your city also in the USA? Find out
The city of “New Braunfels” was founded in 1845 by German immigrants in Texas
© Moab Republic / Adobe Stock
One or the other in the USA may have stumbled across well-known names to us Germans. Take Mecklenburg County, in the state of North Carolina. Our infographic shows how immigration from Germany is reflected in the naming of American cities to this day
What you know, you like to keep. At least that’s what many German emigrants must have thought when they founded settlements in the USA in the past centuries. Because Detmold, Braunfels, Fulda or Paderborn are not only in Germany, but also in the USA.
Graphic: German city names in the USA
If you are looking for the namesake of your hometown in the USA, write “, USA” in the search field after the place name (example: Flensburg, USA).
After the First and Second World Wars, the spellings of many German city names were Anglicized. There are 21 Frankforts in the United States – but they don’t appear on our map. Only exact matches of the official place names are shown.
Until the 20th century, Germans formed the largest group of immigrants to the United States. Today, most of the American population has German ancestry. The US census from 2000 shows: More than 49.2 million of the 282 million Americans at the turn of the millennium (today there are around 323 million) stated that they were descended from Germans. More recent surveys, such as the 2015 American Community Survey, come to a similar conclusion.
Graphic: Percentage of German-born population per federal state
The first German settlement in the USA was founded in 1683 by 13 families from the Krefeld area, the so-called “Original 13”. Her name: Germantown. Today, the once-independent community is a borough of Philadelphia. The majority of the population is now African American.
Stimulated, among other things, by a popular travelogue by Gottfried Duden, a particularly large number of Germans settled in the Midwest. Even today, the percentage of ethnic Germans in the states of Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, North and South Dakota and Wisconsin is highest.
There is another special feature in Pennsylvania, where almost a quarter of the population has German roots. Because the so-called Pennsylvania German has survived there to this day, even with own newspaper.
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2023-08-25 07:00:00
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