The Bardelmeier families

The origin of all Bardelmeier families has to be found in Westfalen, in the North-West of Germany. They were concentrated in two regions: the region around the village of Halle, presently named Gütersloh, and 30 kilometres westwards, the region around the village of Lienen, presently named Steinfurt.
The earliest sparing archive records date from the end of the 16th century. It seems plausible that the population in both places expanded independently during the second half of the 17th century. In the Halle region records are to be found from about 1650, in the Lienen region a bit later, from the beginning of the 18th century.
During the 19th century, in a period of great poverty, several Bardelmeiers emigrated to countries with better prospects. They founded families in the USA and the Netherlands.

1. The German families from the Steinfurt region

2. The American families

3. The Dutch families

4. The German families from the Gütersloh region

Residences of Bardelmeier families in the 18th and 19th century

This is, as far as I know, a first effort to set up family trees of all persons named Bardelmeier (with the exception of the younger generations, because of privacy reasons). Which meant bringing order into a huge mass of names, collected from a wide range of genealogical websites. This resulted in a number of sometimes very incomplete family trees, teeming with 'possibles' and 'probables'.
For several reasons the reconstruction of the various family trees meets tedious problems:
The first one is that many records are available, at the same time without doubt many are missing. For example, FamilySearch offers lots of birth records, but remarkably few death records.
Secondly, problems are caused by the inaccuracy of the officials who had to register birth, marriage and death certificates, particularly in the 18th century and before. Ages are sometimes one or more years in error, and the orthography of names is inconsistent: one and the same person may be called Bardelmeyer, Barlmeyer or Barlemeier, Eberhard or Everdt, Anna Margaretha, Margaretha Elisabeth or only Elisabeth (and there are lots of Annas, Margarethas and Elisabeths).
Moreover the diversity of names is rather small. Parents took little trouble to give their children easy to distinguish names. What to think of Conrad Heinrich Bardelmeier from Lienen, who called his three daughters Anna Catharina, Anna Catharina Elisabeth and Anna Sophia, respectively?
Additional problems are caused by transcription errors and misreadings of documents (18th-century German written texts are often hardly legible) and, not to forget, mistakes by Bardelmeier investigators in their family trees (without doubt including the present author).