MITTELSTEDT -- GERMANY
The number of people named Mittelstedt, Mittelstaedt and Mittelstadt listed in the 2010 German telephone directory for all Germany was:
Mittelstedt 136 Mittelstaedt 1263 Mittelstadt 24
Magdeburg had 9 "Mittelstedt" phone numbers, and Hamburg and Berlin six each.
The telephone directory can be accessed at www.11880.com. Click on "Telefon Buch" and type in the surname and up pops a list of telephone users with this surname for all Germany.
Clicking on Was Weiss Yasni ueber "Mittelstedt" (What Does Yasni Know about "Mittelstedt") gives a list of Mittelstedts who advertise their profession, or have websites, or have published books, or have achieved some prominence. Some of the Mittelstedts listed by "Yasni" are additional to those listed in the telephone directory.
www.ancestry.de requires payment. Putting "Mittelstedt" in the "Nachnahme" [Surname] box informs us only that "Der Name Mittelstedt kommt ingesamt 168 Mal in 78 Landkreisen vor" [The name Mittelstedt appears 168 times in 78 administrative districts].
The page http://search.ancestry.de/search/searchINTL.aspx offers lists of passenger ships and information on 5 million passengers who left Germany via Hamburg 1850-1934, and other data bases such as censuses, German military deaths, etc. If, however, one wants more than a bare list of names and their destination, payment is required. For free I could only find out the the 5 million emigrants included 40 named Mittelstedt.
With so many Mittelstedts around it's necessary, when tracing one's ancestry, to work back by starting with one's own parents, grandparents, great grandparents, etc, so as not to trace a line that may be unrelated or very distantly related.
My great grandfather Friedrich Heinrich Mittelstedt had seven sons [see "Genealogy Chart 1845 Forward"] but the total number of his grandsons and great grandsons, etc, is not established — I have probably missed some.
The number of males named in the "Genealogy Chart 1650-1845" after Stoffel (1650) and prior to Friedrich Heinrich (1845) include 17 or 18 who may have had offspring but information is not available. These could, in the six intervening generations, have produced hundreds of descendants. And prior to Stoffel the ancestry was traced back to 1537 — which is long enough to have produced dozens more lines of descent.
Therefore, many of the 136 German Mittelstedts listed in the phone books, and also some American Mittelstedts, may be distantly related — descendants of Stoffel or Stoffel's ancestors. And since names in the past often had variable spellings, some Mittelstaedts and Mittelstadts may also be related to the Mittelstedts.
In 1992 I received a letter from a Rolf Mittelstaedt (b. 1950, June 20) in Loitsche north of Magdeburg. He wrote he had relatives in Hamburg, Luebeck, Berlin and other cities as well as overseas and that the spelling of the surname had up to five variations.