Searching for Holwicks

Col. William B. Holwick, my father, was inspired to trace our family’s origins after watching the TV mini-series “Roots” in 1977.  In those days he had to ferret out facts from his father’s memory, county courthouses, graveyards and Mormon research rooms where he ordered microfilms from the vault in Salt Lake City.  He was able to discover our original immigrant and traced out the main family lines of our clan.  Before he died he passed the mantle to me, his oldest son.  During the COVID lockdown of 2020 I dived into our family’s story.  My father wanted to trace us back to our origin.  I wanted to go the other way and find out how all the Holwicks alive today are related.

Holwick is not a common last name.  One member of our clan said that when his family took vacations years ago they would look in phone books in the various cities they visited and check to see if they could find someone who was also named Holwick.  They never did.  Even in the age of the internet I have only been able to find a little over 200 people who share our name.  The reason is that our surname is not that old.  The original family name was Holbe or Holben and dates to the 1600s.  After they came to America in the 1700s and spread out across the country, one of them changed his name to Holwick in the early 1800s.  This may have been because sounding English eased his path to success.  (Interestingly, there is a much smaller band of Holwicks who are not related to the rest of us.  Their ancestor was named Holweg and came from Germany in the early 1900s; I suspect they also changed their name to sound more English and therefore mainstream just like we did.)

How do you pronounce our name?  A few say "HALL-wick".  My grandfather preferred that and some census forms from the 1800s spell the name that way which probably means that is the way the census taker heard it.  Apparently one branch pronounced it "HULL-wick" because after the Civil War they began spelling it that way; today the small Hulwick clan lives in Colorado.  I think the majority of us pronounce it WHOLE-wick.

Where Our Clan Originated

Rothenbergen is a small village in what is now Grundau, Germany.  It is in a heavily forested area in the province of Hesse and is 24 miles northeast of Frankfurt.  On a nearby hill is the Protestant Church on the Hill (Bergkirche Niedergründau).  The sanctuary dates to the 1800s but the church tower is much older, dating to the 1500s.  It would have been standing when our ancestors worshipped there.  The Holbes were Reformed Christians and followed the teachings of Protestant Reformer John Calvin; the equivalent in the United States today is Presbyterian (which my grandfather belonged to) or Christian Reformed.  The Rothenbergen church records mention a Conrad Holbe who was born in 1610 and died in 1680.  He is the earliest direct ancestor who can be traced to us.  One account says his wife was beheaded for witchcraft in 1653.

Conrad had a great-grandson named Johann Jacob Holben who was born on Christmas Day in 1717.  He went by the name “Jacob.”  In 1742 this young man followed three of his brothers and sailed for the New World (one of the brothers died on his journey over).  Jacob landed on Mifflin’s Wharf in Philadelphia and was taken to the State House (now Independence Hall) to swear allegiance to King George II of England.  He then traveled to an area that had recently been purchased from the Indians, to the village of Weisenberg.  He was one of the earliest inhabitants there.  He built a log cabin and then helped to build a church.  He must have been a very spiritual young man because he was made one of the elders of the church.  Jacob died in Weisenberg in 1794 and is buried in his church’s cemetery with a crude field stone which has noticeably faded in recent decades.  All of our clan are descendants of Johann Jacob Holben.

How the Holwick Name Began

Johann Jacob Holben’s four sons all served in the Pennsylvania Militia in the Revolutionary War.  Some of them stayed in Weisenberg but others moved further west.  His son Johann Wendel Holben ended up in Canton, Ohio, in the early 1800s.  Normally he went by Holben but in a land grant document dated 1810 the court recorder put his name as Holwich (even though Wendel signed it as "Holwig").  His only son, Jonathan, had been born in Weisenburg in 1792 but then spent the rest of his life in the Canton area.  He is the first one to (pretty) consistently spell his name HOLWICK, beginning with his marriage license in 1813, and so I consider him the founder of the Holwick clan.

The Holwicks did very well in Canton.  Jonathan’s grandson “B C” Holwick was a manufacturer who produced the Holwick Coffee Grinder.  (My son Daniel has one – they are easy to find on eBay and prominently display our name.)  Only a few Holwicks still live in Ohio and I believe Dale Miller Holwick Jr. who died in 2018 may have been the last one to live in Canton.  Even so, Canton is our birthplace so every Holwick should root for the Cleveland Browns.

Unless they are playing the Kansas City Chiefs.  Canton may be our birthplace but Kansas City is our heartland.  Holwicks continued their westward movement and around 40 Holwicks now live in Kansas and eleven more live in Missouri near Kansas City.  The next highest state is California with 28.  But when you look at the ratios there is no contest.  For every million Kansans there are 13.7 Holwicks; California has 0.7 per million.  The second highest state, per million?  Montana.  It doesn’t take many Holwicks to skew a state higher – my son’s family of four live in New Hampshire and they make that state #3 when you look at it per million.

The trend today is for Holwicks to move anywhere.  Some have even moved back to Johann Jacob Holben’s area of Pennsylvania without realizing its significance.  I have found Holwicks in 28 states and the nation of Sweden.  (Facebook has a young man named Holwick in England but I can’t figure out how he relates to us and he has never responded to my messages.  Our name has nothing to do with the quaint town of Holwick in England though I would like to visit it someday.)

	Total Holwicks per state			Holwicks per million residents
1	Kansas	40		Kansas	2,913,314	13.73
2	California	28		Montana	1,068,778	6.55
3	Pennsylvania	17		New Hampshire	1,359,711	2.94
4	Texas	15		Arkansas	3,017,825	2.65
5	Georgia	14		Colorado	5,758,736	2.08
6	Colorado	11		Missouri	6,137,428	1.63
7	Missouri	11		Maine	1,344,212	1.49
8	Arkansas	8		New Mexico	2,096,829	1.43
9	Washington	8		Pennsylvania	12,801,989	1.33
10	Wisconsin	8		Georgia	10,617,423	1.32
11	Montana	7		Wisconsin	5,822,434	1.20
12	Illinois	6		Washington	7,614,893	1.05
13	Ohio	5		Oklahoma	3,956,971	1.01
14	Indiana	4		California	39,512,223	0.71
15	New Hampshire	4		Utah	3,205,958	0.62
16	North Carolina	4		Indiana	6,732,219	0.59
17	Oklahoma	4		West Virginia	1,792,147	0.56
18	Virginia	4		Texas	28,995,881	0.52
19	New Mexico	3		Illinois	12,671,821	0.47
20	Arizona	2		Virginia	8,535,519	0.47
21	Maine	2		Ohio	11,689,100	0.43
22	New Jersey	2		North Carolina	10,488,084	0.38
23	Utah	2		Nevada	3,080,156	0.32
24	Florida	1		Arizona	7,278,717	0.27
25	Massachusetts	1		New Jersey	8,882,190	0.23
26	Nevada	1		Massachusetts	6,949,503	0.14
27	New York	1		Sweden	10,099,265	0.10
28	Sweden	1		New York	19,453,561	0.05
29	West Virginia	1		Florida	21,477,737	0.05
	Total:	215	(as of June 2020)

(I deduced the location of Holwicks from Facebook and aggregating sites like Whitepages and PeekYou.  I expect there are numerous errors but it is the best I could do.  A Holwick is anyone who was born with that name even if they later marry outside the family, or who become a Holwick through marriage, or who is adopted into a Holwick family.  If someone marries a Holwick and then divorces but keeps using the Holwick name, I include them.)

What Are Holwicks Like?

This is impossible to answer, of course, but my research has come up with some interesting angles.  Holwicks in the heartland tend to be conservative politically and Evangelical Christian in faith.  Holwicks on the coasts are more likely to be registered as Democrats and be Roman Catholic in faith.  Some in the southwest and northwest are Mormon.  Throughout the country we tend to be middle class though a few own their own businesses and have done exceptionally well while others are living hand-to-mouth.  Those with children tend to have two or three.  Many Holwicks are upstanding citizens with very positive attitudes about life and a deep love for America.  I have also heard of some who are fast-talking connivers who are surly and controlling.  My grandfather was an “Illinois Holwick” and I greatly admired him, but he was very prejudiced against blacks.  He also never let my grandmother know that car seats could be shifted forward – she thought it was normal to put two pillows behind her when she was in the driver’s seat.  I am sure that every Holwick has their own stories of our quirks and traits.

I have often wondered, how much are these other Holwicks like me?  Is there anything we have in common?  One thing all of us males would have in common is our “Y” chromosome which passes from father to son with very little change.¹  I recently took a DNA test for the Y-chromosome and found our haplgroup is I-M223 which has been tied to Stone Age people who lived in the region of Germany and Scandinavia 13,000 years ago.  One other man who links to me through this test is named Hulver and our common ancestor is Johann Jacob Holben’s father Ulrich Holbe who never left Germany.  This gives me confidence that the Holwick/Holben genealogy is accurate to at least 11 generations.  Ironically, the regular DNA test I took with Ancestry.com showed I have only 3% German heritage left in me.  (Mathematically, I received only 0.4 percent of my DNA from Johann Jacob Holben.)  What have you found in DNA tests?

What Will Happen To the Holwick Name?

It is cool to belong to a select group of people.  I have found that I am at least a fifth cousin to any Holwick in the world (except for that outlier group I mentioned above and the guy in England).  The downside is that it is a vulnerable name.  There are only about 40 male Holwicks who are at the age where they might have kids.  Some of them will have none while most of the others will probably have two children or less.  With birth rates falling around the world, in 80 years many countries in Europe and Asia will have half the population they do today.  The same will happen with our families.  Consider this: the first person named Holwick had 18 grandsons who shared his last name.  I have one grandson who shares my surname.  I suspect that within another four generations our name may be gone.

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¹ This would not apply to those who are adopted or their offspring, or in a few other cases.

Next Page - What Do Holwicks Look Like?  (plus a spreadsheet that links all the living Holwicks)