This information is from Ines Weissenberg, a researcher from Historical Research Services (HRS) Germany.
The parishes of Tettens, Wüppels and Hohenkirchen where your ancestors resp. side lines lived in belong to the so-called “Wangerland” which is neighbouring East Frisia (Ostfriesland). The Wangerland also can be considered as a Frisian area but there are some differences to East Frisia because non-Frisian influences have been stronger there than in East Frisia. Therefore you find a kind of cultural mix in the Wangerland in some respects. One of these respects is the naming practice. Whereas in East Frisia the so-called patronymic naming was valid for a long time, the custom of having fixed surnames like we know it today came to the Wangerland earlier. Mixed forms existed here for some time until the patronymic naming finally vanished. First of all, I will explain to you what the patronymic naming in East Frisia was like. Afterwards, I will concentrate on the differences concerning your ancestors in the Wangerland.
For a long time a special kind of naming was used in East Frisia – different from many other areas in Germany where surnames were used. In addition to some other areas in Germany it was also common in Scandinavian countries. It is still valid in Iceland today! This is the so-called patronymic naming which I will explain to you now for a better understanding of your ancestors’ history:
Until the first half of the 19th century, few families in East Frisia (Ostfriesland) had permanent family names. Before that, patronymics had been customary for centuries, i.e. a child got the first name of its father as its second name. Thus, the family name changed with every generation. If, for instance, a man called Harm had three sons, they would be named Gerd Harms, Jan Harms, and Menno Harms – i.e. Harm’s children. But his grandchildren by his eldest son would carry the last name Gerdes (children of Gerd), those by his second son would be named Janssen (children of Jan), and those by his youngest son would be named Mennen (children of Menno). This did not change until the time of Napoleon, who passed a law in 1811 that everybody in East Frisia had to have a fixed surname within a family. After the French reign had ceased (East Frisia was part of the French Empire between 1810 and 1813) many East Frisians returned to patronymic naming although some already kept the new fixed family names. In 1829 the royal government in Hanover decreed the adoption of permanent family names again. People added to their present name either a permanent family name of their choice or they kept their patronym unchanged through subsequent generations, i.e. the patronym became a surname. So, from then on all children of Gerd, Jan and Menno Harms would also have got the name Harms. In the case of simply adding a completely new surname, the traditional way of naming still kept coming through. If, for instance, Gerd Harms had chosen to take on the surname Hannema his first son probably would have got the name Harm Gerdes Hannema. It took a while until the patronymic naming vanished: the old patronymic names were still in use in a lot of East Frisian regions in the 1830s.
Actually, there were some families that had a surname very early. Either these families originally came from a completely different area and were not familiar with patronymic naming, i.e. they immigrated to East Frisia from somewhere else, or these surnames were used as an additional descriptive identifier to distinguish one person from another one with exactly the same name.
It is important to understand that a "patronym" and a "surname" are two distinctly different things. Patronyms make the search for ancestors much more complicated because this means there is no fixed family name to look for.
Choosing a first name for their child a couple often followed traditional East Frisian naming rules: the first male child was named after the paternal grandfather and the second male child got the name of the maternal grandfather. First and second daughter were named after paternal and maternal grandmother. The third son was named after his father, the fourth son after the father’s paternal grandfather. The third daughter was named after the mother, the fourth daughter after the mother’s paternal or even maternal grandmother. In some cases parents would alternate the family sides when naming their children. Then, there were also other aspects of choosing a first name such as reusing a deceased child’s name for the next child of the same sex and naming the first daughter/son of a subsequent marriage after the deceased former spouse. These rules expressed the believe that a person continued to live in its descendants. So it was common that only a limited set of first names was used within a family. Of course, there were always exceptions to these "rules" but often they are very useful to remember. Not being acquainted with this way of naming it often can be very confusing to have a few different persons with exactly the same name within the family. You already might have noticed in the table of contents at the beginning that there are a few men named Anton Bernhard Toelstede or Mehne Behrens Toelstede within your family tree.
Well, now to the differences concerning your ancestors in the Wangerland. When reading the church book entries below you will notice that your ancestors had their surname Toelstede all the time, even as far back as Ulrich Bernhard Toelstede’s great-grandfather Mehne Behrens Toelstede who married prior to 1732. So the Toelstedes belong to the families that had a fixed surname rather early. Taking into account as well the favoured first names Anton, Bernhard and even Ulrich within the Toelstede family which are unusual Frisian names this might be a hint that the Toelstede’s emigrated to the Wangerland from a different area at an unknown time before. But this is only speculation at the present state of research. Looking at the choice of first names for a child we can observe that the Toelstede’s often seemed to have followed the traditional Frisian rules. But you can even see that complete names of an ancestor, i.e. first name and patronym, were given to a child as kind of first names with the surname Toelstede at the end. In most cases this happened with maternal lines. The thought behind this perhaps was that on the paternal side there was the fixed surname anyway that was kept on so that there was no need for an added patronym in the middle whereas the name on the maternal side otherwise would have been lost. So to kind of make the reminiscence of the maternal ancestor complete his or her complete name was given to the child. Good examples are your direct ancestor Nanne Eden Toelstede and his cousin Johann Heeren Toelstede who both got the complete names of their respective maternal grandfathers in front of the surname Toelstede.
Then, it can be observed that even in families with a name of obviously patronymic origin the patronym was used as a surname rather early. For instance, if you look at the baptismal entries of the children of Anton Bernhard Toelstede and his second wife Adelheit you will see that she is recorded with an Eden at the end as well like her father. According to patronymic naming she would have to be called Adelheit Nannen – at least before her marriage. Looking at the first wife of Anton Bernhard Toelstede we see that she is recorded as Catharina Margaretha Alts, the Alts probably being a patronym derived from her deceased husband’s Alt Jürgens first name. In the baptismal entry of a child she is recorded as Catharina Margarethe Jürgens which looks like the use of a surname then. There are three possible explanations for these observations: 1. due to non-Frisian influences the patronymic naming was more and more regarded as old-fashioned in the area; 2. the record-keeper changed and the new one was a non-Frisian person, 3. maybe because the two women married a man with a non-patronymic name it was felt that their naming had to be adjusted to it, i. e. their former patronymic naming was given up in favour of a surname.
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