This week I am going to highlight someone who is not really related to me, but I am fascinated by the name. Maria Sara Knieriemen was the wife of my first cousin five times removed. (My computer program, TMG, figured that out for me). I had never heard of this name before, so when her marriage to David Horneff on January 7, 1845 showed up in my genealogy this week, I thought I would look into it.
Like many names, Knieriemen has many variant spellings. The Knierman DNA Surname project includes these variants in their project: Knearem, Knerien, Kniereman, Knieriemen, Knierim, Knierinm, Knierman, Knireman, Nearman, Niermann. In their description of the origin they state: “The German word Knerem is defined as a shoemakers’ strap or stirrup, a cobbler, Knieriemen.”
A search on Knieriemen also brought up the Ancestry surname page. They didn’t have a meaning for Knieriemen, but they did have some other statistics. In 1920, there weren’t very many Knieriemen households in the United States, with 3 each in Ohio and Indiana, 2 in New Jersey and 1 in Maryland. Places of origin gathered from the New York Passengers Lists shows they were from Germany. In the United States in 1880 they were farmers, and there was one Cobanus Knieriemen who fought for the Union in the Civil War.
Maria Sara Knieriemen was born about 1818 and was the daughter of Conrad Knieriemen and Katharina Albrecht. She married David Horneff in Otterberg, Bavaria.