Cindi,

> Gshwender is more commonly from baden areas such as Buhletal, Freiburg, Shwarzland, etc.<

Since I have never compared the occurrencies by numbers, I cannot comment on this. My reason for pointing out the Gschwenders in Austria was solely to add a piece of information that was missing in the puzzle sofar. There are a few hundred people with this name + variants in Austria of today, this may be important to know (or maybe not).

> It supposedly originated in the Black Forest region. <

This may well have been so. If the Dictionary at Ancestry.com is correct, this seems to be a topographic or habitational name. These places were named Schwende (and still are, only that people forgot the meaning).

http://www.xipolis.net/ also says 'Schwender' was an occupational name, meaning woodcutter. And it supports the earlier point of being related to a place in the forest that has been cleared/stubbed. Based on the Middle-High German word swende.

The question is, how and where to the use of this term has spread over time. I can well imagine that it travelled along the Rhine valley between Switzerland and the Schwarzwald - according to your information it went upstream the Rhine. And apparently has touched the Western Austrian provinces too where mainly the Gschwendtner variant of the name is rather widespread (about 200 phone entries) throughout Tyrol, Salzburg and Upper-Austria.

As interesting as this sounds, it's only a hint, not more. People did move & travel also in the past, and maybe a family surfaced in a totally different place after some time.

I can easily comprehend your frustration with wrong information in family trees. Meanwhile I have learned that most that's printed is just temporary knowledge. Sometimes (hopefully) we just stumble across a new piece of information, and our tree does change a bit, but hopefully we'll never have to hack it down completely <s>

This is also true for any kind of information printed in books. The info was just based on what the author knew at the time. So - we as family historians always have to be on the lookout for new pieces in our puzzle. Exciting !

Regards
Tilman