During the 1950s and 1960s there would be people regularly attended the annual Heiden Family Reunions whose names were not familiar to me. Anytime I would ask someone about these people, they were described as "distant cousins" or "shirttail relations" but nobody could explain exactly how they were related to us.

The most common surnames I would hear were Laas, Berlin, Burmeister, Brown and Warner. A family named Regelin lived a few miles from us and they were also described as shirttail relations but I don't remember ever interacting with them at all.

All I knew was that Caroline (Laas) Brown (upper right with husband, Bill), Alice (Laas) Berlin, Libbie Laas, Rika (Laas) Burmeister and her daughters, Lucille (Burmeister) Lehmkuhl (left with her husband Gus) and Florence (Burmeister) Warner attended almost every reunion during this period. They were called the relations from Toledo and some of them also came from Texas occasionally although I do not remember them specifically.

During my research of the family, I was finally able to make some sense of how these very nice people were related to us. Shown in the chart below, I found that Rika (Knaack) Heiden, my great grandmother had an aunt on her mother's side whose married name was Regelin or Roggelein. She had two children i.e. Rika's second cousins, named Frederick Regelin and his sister, Dorothea, who married Johann Laas. All of the people mentioned above where the children of those two cousins.

So, according to my computer program RootsMagic 9, Caroline (Laas) Brown and the others are all my third cousins, twice removed! See the chart at the bottom of the page.

The spelling of this family's name has appeared in many different forms over the years and throughout the documents. Most of the people in rural Germany in the late 19th century were illiterate and relied on church pastors to write their names into the record books. Often, the pastor simply spelled a name phonetically to the best of his ability or just spelled it incorrectly without reference to earlier entries by another cleric.

The birth, census, marriage and death records for what we will call the Regelin family have been recorded in at least the eight variations listed at the top of this page. The dates and places match for each person but the name may be spelled differently on various forms. We will give most weight to instances where the person actually signed his or her name. Also, names chiseled onto headstones are usually creditable.

If you have some personal knowledge about this name, please let us know.