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Re: anyone know anything behind Henke?
I mean as a last name, thanks for all the help :)
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We are most certainly German; from the Prussia area in my case, which I would assume is why others have said there are Polish links. My grandmother was Polish, Wersonski. My great-grandfather came here about the same time as one of the other posts, 1912, and settled in Watertown WI. We are all over the place now as far as I can tell. Haven't done any new searching for relatives in a long time.
The interesting new thing I found was there seems to be an abundance of the surname Henke in Sweden now.
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The surname is definately German. No doubt about it. My grandfather came over from Germany as a little boy around 1912. He was from an area that today is part of Poland. The name of the town is Polzin. As one of the other people have posted, the border between Germany and Poland were redrawn many times over the centuries. I did some research a while back and I learned that Henke is the root word of the german word for "hangman". If you use a english to german translation, you will find that the german word for "hangman" is "Henker". Somewhere along the line the letter "r" was dropped.
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