Hi Gaila, It is my understanding that a good deal of the families with these surnames, came by them through empirical edict under Napoleon. Prior to Napoleon's conquest of Europe; surnames, in this area(Friesland), where passed down patronymically. That is to say, your surname is a derivation of your father's first name as his surname was a derivation of his father's first name. By derivation, I am refering to the addition of a suffix to the root name. As it seems to be common place in Autocratic societies to need everything and everyone to be codified and quantified, it is very difficult to keep records of people with this system of naming children. Actually, the Frisians had an even more complicated system, that depended on the order of your birth and your gender, so the Frisians where ordered to pick a surname and stick with it. I'm not sure of the exact date, but somewhere around 1811-12. It is my guess that the different spellings are due to dialectual differences, such as Frees, Freese, Frese, Freesen=Plattdeutsch spelling(It's hard to pin down an "official" Plattdeutsch); Fries, Friese, Friesen=Hochdeutsch spelling(the "official" language of Germany); Vries, DeVries=Dutch; DeFrees, DeFreese are from somewhere in between. Now the exception to this is that I have found very old references to a Viktor Freese(Frese), from the twelveth century, having dealings with the Bishop of Utrecht. The manuscript was in Latin and I fear my Latin is rusty at best. There are also some von Fries's from the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries. Therefore there must have also been families who took Fries/Frees as a place name. My guess is that these people might be of some higher rank in society(the v. Fries for example). Not my lineage, of that I'm sure. Concerning your von Riesen family line, I can't say where it originates other than it's a good guess that Riesen is a place name. About Friesland, at it's height, it estended from the middle of Holland up to Denmark (including the islands) and quite a bit of territory inland. In the dark ages, the Frisians where known as sea traders and raiders. They raided as far south as Normandy and Brittany(present day names). The Vikings soon overtook this trade and perfected it. Friesland was the launching point of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England. It is thought that the Frisian Boatbuilders where responsible for transporting the tribes over the hundreds of years of settlement. Some Frisians went to England with the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. They settled mostly in Essex. A "Mr. Frees" is mentioned in connection with the production of Shakespeare's plays. to find out more about the Frisians visit "The Windmill" and "Folkhart" websites. Most German-Frisians speak Plattdeutsch, whereas most Dutch-Frisians speak the language of Fryslan, their original frisian dialect(West-Frisian). Frisian is mostly lost in Germany with exception of Saterland. Saterland is an area mosly surrounded by moors and therefore isolated from it's neighbors until the latter part of the 1800's. East-Frisian is still spoken there. North-Frisian is still spoken in northern Germany near the border with Denmark and on the Island of Sylt. After all is said and done we must come to the conclusion that if I meet someone on the street named Freese and you meet someone named Friesen, we have most likely not met a blood relative, no matter how far back one tracks. Best of Luck with your research! I hope that this has been helpful, Dan