Mellenbrook Family History & Genealogy

Summary

The Mellenbrook family of Cuyahoga County, Ohio is known to have started as Moellenbrock in the Osnabrueck area of Hanover, Germany. 
The Mellenbrook name in Indiana and Kansas has been traced to Muehlenbruch (and similar spellings)  in the Nienburg area of Hanover, Northern Germany. 
Researchers of both families in the USA have so far been unable to find any direct connection between these two North German immigrant groups.

History

The spelling of "MELLENBROOK" is used almost exclusively by the descendants of German immigrants from Osnabrueck, Hanover, who settled in Olmsted Township and the village of Olmsted Falls in Cuyahoga County, Ohio.   From that location the name spread to Florida, California, Arizona, Montana and New Mexico (as seen in the "Relatives" section) as well as remaining in the Cleveland area in Cuyahoga and Ashland counties. 
The original spelling for this group was MOELLENBROCK, Osnabrueck-style. One of the Olmsted immigrants devised the spelling "Moellenbrook."  Later the "o" was dropped, leaving "Mellenbrook."
The Mellenbrook spelling is seen in Clark County, Ohio, and has been adopted by a large group of German (MUEHLENBRUCH) descendants in the White Creek area of Indiana and in Brown County, Kansas. These German-Americans came from a different part of Hanover.
Two other groups, in Missouri and Pennsylvania, have retained the original MOELLENBROCK spelling.  There are many other groups in the USA, representing a number of spelling variations on this name.
Photos, stories and more information on MELLENBROOK, MOELLENBROCK and even MUHLENBRUCH families can be found at

Name Origin

The two elements of the German name are: MUEHL-  and - BRUCH, with the -en-  as the connector between the two.  (The /e/ here stands for an umlaut over the /u/.)
MUEHL - means "mill," as in a windmill or a water mill.  It is related to the French /moulin/ and the Spanish /molina/, a mill.
-BRUCH means "brake" as in cane-brake, a clearing in a swamp or forest. It can also mean quarry.  The English word "brook" comes from Old English "broch" which might have had some connection in the past, but "brake" is the more accurate translation.
 

Spellings & Pronunciations

Standardizing an English spelling of our German name(s) to "Mellenbrook" solved only half the problem of dealing with Old World variations. (It also obscured the unique local character of those spellings, which are often so helpful to the genealogist in pinning down an area.)
Once in the USA, the name remained subject to handwritten misspellings by US Census takers and county clerks, based solely on someone's hearing of a name, or on illegible document copies. These errors were then repeated, or new ones introduced by misreading the handwriting, into neatly typed indexes. Many of today's digitized records are based on these erroneous indexes and documents, sometimes making it nearly impossible to find an individual's public or court record even though there MUST be one there. 
A common recent misspelling of Mellenbrook as "Mellonbrook" is not too bad, but the earlier variations are downright maddening to the family researcher.
The Mellenbrook name has appeared on public records as any of the following: "Moerlenbruck" (on a marriage license), "Mallenbrook" and "Melinbrogh" (important Naturalization documents) and even "Manbrook" (US Census). 
If one is unable to visit an archive in person, it is nearly impossible to describe to a clerk in a remote office all the "wrong" filings that are possible, or to even guess what they might be. And when a genealogist is searching for more than one name, ALL the names tend to have this same problem: "transcription errors."

Nationality & Ethnicity

This very "English" sounding name is a phonetic respelling of the German names Moellenbrock and Muehlenbruch and their many variations.  Those names are found almost exclusively in Northern Germany in previous centuries, primarily in the states of Hanover and Westfalia.
Variations of the name also appear in the Netherlands (Moolenbroek) and in England. One Dutch family has traced the name back to von (der) Moulenbroucke in 17th century Belgium. The earliest appearance of the German name is around 1600s in Westfalia. It appears around 1700 in Hanover, Germany. As explained above, this is the English respelling of a GERMAN name.  It is not from England, although the name is known to appear in England, like many other anglicized German names.

Famous People named Mellenbrook

Our most famous ancestor is Andreas Valentinus MOELLENBROCK, who contributed to the earliest research on the treatment of scurvy.  In his book Cochlearia curiosa, he describes a method of processing Scurvy-grass (Cochlearia) to treat the disease. His book was published in 1676.  Moellenbrock's research "could be considered an early experimental forerunner of the isolation of crystalline vitamin C in 1932," according to a source at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Early Mellenbrooks

These are the earliest records we have of the Mellenbrook family.