VINEYARD / WINYARD FAMILY HISTORY

Some notes on the Vineyard families of the USA

Although the Vineyard name is far from common in North America, there are a number of families of this name which have been investigated by various researchers over the years. There are a range of details on the message boards at ancestry.com and genealogy.com, and a number of researchers' interests are incorporated in the other interests page on this website. A group of active researchers are sharing their work through myfamily.com. 

It would appear that several of the US Vin(e)yard lines have Germanic origins, possibly deriving from an anglicised version of the names Weingardt, Weingart(n)er, Weinert and the like, and that a number of these families arrived in the US during the 18th century. Several of the families have German first name patterns among the early generations. A DNA test has been run to investigate a potential link between the Ishmael Vineyard and Christian Weinert / Vineyard lines, although this yielded a negative result. Judy Vinyard Beebe's research into the descendants of Ishmael Vineyard was published in book form in 1990 as 'A Walk Through the Vineyards' (written and compiled by Thomas Daniel Knight), and Shari Bennett is leading an effort to produce an online version. Debra Seaman has produced an e-book (351pp), available from her on CD-ROM, which incorporates both Judy's book and additional material from her notes. Publications have also been produced by other earlier researchers, and analysis and research continues in this area.

Apart from the lines of German descent, there appear to be other Vineyard lines in the US which also date back to the mid-18th century but may have their origins within the UK (England or Scotland). Again, research continues into the early history of these less Germanic looking lines.

Any US researchers interested in providing a more substantive summary of the state of research into the US Vineyards for incorporation here, or who have suitable links to other online Vineyard resources of interest, are invited to send details to the coordinator for this page, Ian Hall.

This page was last updated 16 May 2007