The Loes Family

by

James W. Neiers

25 September, 1998

While not occurring in large number, the Loes surname is encountered throughout the United States and Canada, most of which have roots in areas of Europe that were at one time under Prussian influence. Those Loes families I am particularly interested in originated in Luxembourg, in the region around Medingen and Contern. Many decendants of my ancestors still live in Luxembourg.

Because of the Franco-Prussian wars and changing political influence, many name variations were encountered, depending upon contemporary authority in power. For instance, the same person may be Pierre, Peter, or Petrus depending upon whether the priest making the entry in the baptism, marriage, or death record chose to write respectively in French, German, or Latin.

The name Loes also appears with several variations such as: Lees, Les, Lies, Liess, Los, Loss, Less, and Loesch. The Loesch variation seems to have been prevalent during the years of Napoleonic influence. Many of these variations are a result of the transliteration of the German script of: L, O with an umlat, and a final S or sometimes what appears as a final double S. The closest English transliteration is Loes and was the form generally used by the immigrant when he wrote his own name. The phonetic American spelling, as was sometimes written by others, was Less. One variation of Loes to Less occurred in the Cascade, Iowa area when two Matt Loeses were frequently getting each other's mail. One decided to end the problem by changing the spelling of his name to Less.

With the following pages, I've attempted to outline some of the major family relationships and to concentrate on the family of Michael Loes and Margarite Entringer, who were my great-grandparenets. Hopefully, I will fill in the details on the other families one day soon.

I compiled most of the material in these pages during the 1980s. That material includes both Neiers and Loes genealogy. Both of these ancestoral families came from Luxembourg. Through the many generations since the ealiest records in the 1700s, Neiers and Loes descendants have frequently married. With the conversion to a web page format, I intend to maintain some separation of the two families.

I am indebted to many people who contributed information on the Neiers and Loes families. I hesitate to mention names because so many have been involved that I cannot recall all of them. Nevertheless, I will take the risk and mention a few instances because the excitement I enjoyed when I obtained that information was so memorable.

First, we all owe a debt to our ancestors and their contemporaries who took the time to record those births, baptisms, marriages, and deaths. Without those records, our genealogy would be very dissapointing.

Next, I want to mention Michael J. Neiers who in the early 1900s prepared a genealogy of the Neiers and Loes families. This provided a starting point that bridged the distance back to Luxembourg.

Some others who provided significant quantity of information that was key to tying together the many families are:

• Father Pierre Marten of Burmaerange, Luxembourg who provided many details on the family of Michael Loes and Margaret Entringer
• Father John Wey of Trintingen, Luxembourg who provided much information on the Neiers family.
• Mrs. Wilfred Knepper of Dubuque, IA who helped me with the Nicholas Loes and Margaret Gehrens descendants.
• Mark Loes who helped me with many of the obscure connections, who provided much of the Mary Johanna Loes and John Moes family information, who filled in much of the information on the Mathias Loes and Margaret Neiers family, and who most of all, rekindled my enthusiasm for the Neiers/Loes genealogy. He did this twice, once in in 1985 and again with the coming of the world wide web.

The really exciting moment in this genealogy, I owe to Anne Gisele Err-Loes of Esch/Alzette, Luxembourg who provided most of the information on the family of John Liess and Elisabeth Conter and their descendants. This helped clarify the relationships among those Loes families that "we knew were related but did not know how".

My earliest Loes record is of the family of Jacob Liess (Loes, Lesch) and Elisabeth Conter.

I have revised information that goes back to the grandparents of Jacob, Jacobus Liess and Catharina.

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