The Name

“Urhahn” is an elder German word for the Auerhahn, a chicken related bird. Thus, the name is a sobriquet that results from a nickname given to somebody who had character attributes similar to that famous bird. Possible character attributes for the first Urhahns could have been vanity or aggressiveness.

In the middle ages, the Auerhahn was a quite common animal in Germany. Therefore, the name could have been originated at several places in the same time. As far as I known, there was an accumulation in the area of the former Eastern Prussia around Königsberg (Kaliningrad). My own ancestors came from there and migrated into Western Germany around the 1900s. Today, the biggest concentration of people with the family name Urhahn is in the very west of Germany (District Sankt Wendel, Euskirchen, Düren und City of Essen), see also this map here.

A few Urhahns made it across the Atlantic ocean. Did you know that Urhahn is on place 59492 of the most common family names in the USA? My grand-grandmother had some contact to relatives in the US. But they had the surname Cockrich - most probably this was a forced renaming from the immigration office. From time to time people with the surname ‘Urhahn’ or similar are writing me, who suspect that their relatives came from Germany in the 18 or 19 hundreds.

To stay with my direct ancestry: my grand-grandfather came from Eastern Prussia into the west (Alsace) as cavalry sergeant. He died in WW1. The family was relocated to Verden/Aller in Lower Saxony. My granddad Karl Urhahn was raised there and had later a bakery in Wechold near Bremen. He survived WW2 as radio operator in the navy air force and became steel maker in Bremen.

Please visit my ancestry tree via the link in the left bar.

The Animal

The Auerhahn (tetrao urogallius, wood grouse, capercallie) is a chicken related bird that is native to woods and mountains of middle Europe. The Auerhahn used to be common animal, and its mating rituals became famous and feared. It happened that trespassers were attacked by love-blind cocks.

Today the Auerhahn became very scarce. It is assumed that the massive reduction in the population results on the reduction of mixed forest and undergrowth that the bird needs as habitat. Today, wild wood grouses exist only in the Alps and in the Black Forest. The population of the latter is in the range of 600 animals and is only scarcely viable. The Auerhahn is on the red list of species in danger of extinction. Near the Feldberg mountain, there is a nice information centre of the Black Forest national park (Naturpark Südschwarzwald).

More about the Auerhahn in English language is here.