About

This website was originally a playground and my primary use was to gain a personalised email address. You can now find me over here mostly.

Who am I? I’m ‘Stuart Dyckhoff‘ and I am a part of the larger Dyckhoff clan. As I have found since, we exist all over the world but in my younger days I was a little ‘myopic’.  So, I guess the real question is why did I decide to move to encompassing the rest of the clan as I know them.

• Well part of the reason is that as a mostly, UK based bunch, we are getting to a size now that I simply don’t know some, have never met or just don’t see them often enough to do justice. And this is one way of helping to track them and maybe even to stay in touch a bit.
• Secondly, I wanted to pick up the ball, so to speak, that former generations have so ably managed to date of looking after the family tree. It is my hope that this site will galvanise the younger Dyckhoff’s to maintain their own history or at least to appreciate where they have come from. That includes myself and my generation of Dyckhoff’s.
• Next, I wanted a way to digitise the data we have so far and to be able to make it interactive and updateable.
• Finally as part of a college course [which I wrote about here], the what better time or opportunity did I need to get started.

And so here we are.

Dyckhoff [and it’s many variations] is from Middle Low German d?k ‘dike’ + hof ‘farmstead manor farm’ for someone who lived ‘at the farmstead by the dike’. I was, perhaps a bit heretically, always taught that it was more akin to a castle, or manor house with a moat. Either way it is of Dutch/German origin and to date I have tracked it back to approx 1500.

How to Pronounce: this is not so contentious to me as it once was, but in English, there are two commonly accepted approaches:

1. Dee-cough
2. Dye-cough

I grew up very much being taught and always using the first. All of my immediate family (grand parents, uncles, aunts, cousins, etc) all use the first. But probably the most famous Dyckhoff that I am aware of is Tom Dyckhoff and he pronounces it as per #2. I say that, but maybe it is just how TV does it and like me he’s possibly just grown used to it.

What I can tell you, 100% categorically, it is never Dick..etc ;)