Wengert

There are three main WENGERT families in the USA and I have not made a connection in Germany that ties them together.  Two of the families, including mine, settled in Iowa in the 1850s.  The third came to the USA much earlier and settled in PA.  I suspect the 3rd is your family.  I have noted that E-Bay has a genealogy of the PA WENGERTs that is on sale from time to time....I use WENGERT as a search name at E-Bay.  The WENGERT family in PA is also connected with the WENGERT DAIRY.  I did see that there are three entries for her in family trees at ANCESTRY.COM.  Sorry I cannot help much more.

Here is what I know about the name...this was written by my brother, Timothy Wengert.

What's in a Name? 

         To understand the origins of the Wengert name we have to begin far from the Swabian countryside from which it came and turn our attention to the Benedictine Abbey in Cîteaux, France.  There in 1098 a quiet revolution took place that affected some farm folk in far off Germany or, as it was know in those days, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.  Up until then most Benedictine monasteries were more or less independent from one another, ruled by an abbot and serving the local populace and prince.  But many such monasteries became corrupt and neglected the original intent of their founders to "pray and work."  The monks of Cîteaux reacted against such laxity and became the "Puritans" of the monastic movement in Europe.  Their members were disciplined and austere; their buildings were plain; their organization a model of efficiency.  But they also did something no monastery had ever done before: they formed chapters in other cities with the same strictness, the same architecture and the same government.  Every abbot from these sister monasteries was required to return each year to Cîteaux for new instructions and discipline. 

         Like franchises of McDonald's, these "Cisterician" (Latin for "from Cîteaux") monasteries sprang up all over Europe, especially in the wilderness areas where the life was hard and the challenges great.  In Swabia (the land in southern Germany north of Lake Constance between approximately Stuttgart and Ulm) important Cistercian monasteries included Maulbronn and Bebenhausen.  They brought not only discipline from Cîteaux, they also brought grapes.  And that's where the story of the Cistercians intersects with our own family's history.  There had probably been some scattered cultivation of grapes in the area since Roman times, but, unlike the Rhine Valley, the Neckar River Valley (which runs from Tübingen through Stuttgart to Heidelberg) was considered to have too harsh a climate for such agriculture.  The Cistercians loved a challenge, and so with their arrival they and their peasant farmers cleared the rocky hillsides and began to grow grapes.  The vinyard or Weingarten (wine garden) was called by the locals Wengert (Wen=wein/wine; gert=garten/garden)))and still is. 

         If you ask Germans from anywhere else in Germany about our name, they will mostly likely only know that it is German; but the Swabians will delight in telling you that you are named after the many vinyards that still dot the Neckar River Valleythanks to the Cistercians.  The wine is not often exported, but if it is, you will find it under the label of Württemberg, the main principality in Swabia.  The person who grew the grapes, the vintner, was and is called a Wengerter, and that may indeed be where our name comes from: somewhere back in the distant Middle Ages our ancestors had purple feet!  (It helps explain why there are many Wengerts in this country who are not relatives; they simply had a distant relative in the same occupation as ours.) 


         The "Wengerter" had the right during one month before the Spring to sell what he grew himself without being subject to tax.  These Swabians (who are rumored to be tighter with their money than the Scots: those who couldn't make it in Swabia moved to Scotland, the saying goes), would stick a broom (the kind made with twigs and bound together) out from the second floor of their house like a flagpole as a sign that there was new wine for sale.  I went to such an establishment while living in Tübingen.  There for the first time I met a "Wengerter" who was not a relative but a vintner.  There are many jokes about the "Wengerter" in the area around Tübingen and Reutlingen, mostly centering on the poor quality of the wine and the traditional rivalry between the two towns.  "I hear your grapes were so hard they had to be stamped out by elephants before you could get any juice," the Reutlinger says to the "Gog" (the local name for the "Wengerter").  "Yes," replied the "Gog."  "And they were still tired from stamping out your grapes last year."