Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Your Most Unique Ancestral Name

Hey, genealogy fans - it's Saturday Night - time for more Genealogy Fun!

In honor of Surname Saturday (the new, official genealogy blogging prompt for Saturdays), let's consider this, assuming you accept the challenge to play along (is it Mission Impossible?):

1) What is the most unique, strangest or funniest combination of given name and last name in your ancestry? Not in your database - in your ancestry.

2) Tell us about this person in a blog post, in a comment to this blog post, or in a comment on Facebook.

3) Okay, if you don't have a really good one - how about a sibling of your direct ancestors?

Here's mine:

I actually had a hard time choosing one person, because it seems like almost all of my colonial ancestors had good, common, English sounding names. Some of the German names are a bit interesting, so I chose:

Johann Balthazar Pickel (1687-1765). He was christened on 2 September 1687 in Bad Durkheim, Pfalz Bayern, Germany, as the son of Hans Balthazar Bickel and his wife Anna Eva; the sponsors names are unreadable in the record. He died on 5 December 1765 in Oldwick, Hunterdon County, New Jersey.

Johann Balthazar Pickel and Anna Gertrude Reiterin were married on 16 August 1718 in the Lutheran Church on Staten Island, New York, by Rev. Rosscher, recorded by Rev. Justus Falckner. Anna Gertrude Reiterin was born in 1694 in Germany, and died on 4 December 1761 in Oldwick, Hunterdon County, New Jersey.

Early services of the Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church in Hunterdon County, New Jersey were held in the home of Baltus Pickel. He built at his own expense the Racheway Church (located today at Potterstown) in 1729 and the Leslysland Church about 1735. In 1749, when the Zion Lutheran Church was built at Oldwick, Baltes Pickel contributed money to its constructiion. In his will of 1765 he bequeathed the Zion church 1000 pounds.

Genealogy friends used to tease me by saying "you know, if your ancestor Henry Pickel had married Elizabeth Dill, then she would have been Elizabeth (Dill) Pickel." Now that would have been funny!