At work there's a picture of Robert Franklin Mehl hanging in the conference room. Since my office is right across the hall, with my name prominently displayed, I'm often asked “are you any relation?”
The answer is, regrettably, no. There are currently 2,461 people in the U.S. with the last name Mehl. As far as I can tell, about two hundred of them are descended my great-great grandfather, whose children came here around 1880 and settled in Kansas (didn't you guess?) and Indiana (surprised the heck out of me).
That leaves 2,261 or so unrelated Mehls. That's not too surprising. The literal translation of Mehl is “flour.” I suspect the Mehls were just people who worked with wheat or bread and didn't want to be called Mueller. Thus the various groups of Mehls came from all over the German-speaking part of Europe, and are mostly unrelated.
After being asked so many times about my relationship to Robert, I decided to make a little list. It's a list of people named Mehl, and I'm not related to most of them.
You'll notice the list is a bit old. I haven't updated it in some years. Now that I have the new website, I'd like to put up some new names.
So: If
- Your last name is Mehl,
- You have some web presence I can link,
- You aren't on the list, and
- You'd like to be on the list,
Send me an email at the address on the right. I'll put your name up in weblights forever, or a reasonable approximation thereof.
Note: Though labeled as such, this isn't a really genealogy post. If you last name is Mehl, it's possible, but unlikely, that we're related. It's just for fun.
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