WHAT'S IN A NAME?

Growing up, I always heard (or at least that's the way I remember it) that my name meant I descended from German royalty. After all Ritter means "Knight" in German and house (or haus) means house which surely actually meant "castle". What a cool name! (Although it was awfully long to learn to spell! Luckily my clever mom figured out that Mickey Mouse had the same number of letters and my sisters and brother and I learned to spell it using the Mickey Mouse Club song: R-I-T / T-E-R / H-O-U-S-E.)

According to one source (Daniel K. Cassel in The Genea-Biographical History of Rittenhouse Family and All Its Branches in America, with Sketches of Their Descendants, published in 1893) the derivation of the name Ritterhouse is thought to be from the Teutonic “Housius, rider” (meaning a knight mounted on horseback), altered to the German “Hausen-Ritter,” then to the Anglo-Saxon “Rittershausen” (which is the plural for Rittershaus) and finally to the English “Ritterhouse.”

There were undoubtedly knighted ancestors in our Ritterhouse past. They may be the "royalty" referred to by relatives such as Great-Great-Uncle Bill who always told his niece, Edna, that we "belonged to the German Royalty”. If Cassel's research is correct, the Ritterhouse name can be traced back to 1591 in Germany, when Mathias, the son of Balthaser (who became Sir Maximilian II), was knighted with a coat-of-arms to the House of Knights (“Housius Riders,” Mounted Horsemen) by his second cousin, Emperor Ferdinand III, of Austria, for fighting against the Turks. About 1652-62, Ferdinand improved the coat-of-arms of Mathias and conferred it upon Georgius (who was Mathias’ nephew, being the son of Conradi, another son of Balthaser) and his descendants, both male and female. Georgius then became Sir Rittershausen. The patent for this coat-of-arms is recorded in Barmen, a city in Westphalia. Rittershaus’ obviously lived in the Barmen-Wuppertal area as early as 1466 as indicated by the map above.

Royalty or not, Knight's Castle, House of Knights or Mounted Horsemen, it doesn't really matter. Ritterhouse is still a cool name!