Kies Page

Updated 3 January 2010

My Kies ancestors came from Kehlen, Luxembourg to Dubuque, IA in the 1850s. One of my main goals is to work out the details of how and when they came over. Family lore is that all of the Kieses descended from two brothers who came to the U.S., while one brother remained in Luxembourg. As it turns out, there were more than just those three brothers in the family, but only two came to America. I'm descended from Nicholas, born in 1807. Another Nicholas/Nicholia, born in 1803, settled near Random Lake, WI. It took a while to track down who exactly this brother was. We wouldn't have known he existed exept for his son, Henry.
Henry Kies married a woman named Mary Miller in Random Lake, WI and they moved to the Dubuque, IA area for a time. That is where Mary's younger sister, Elizabeth, married my ancestor, Peter Kies in 1869.
But we aren't the only Kieses in the U.S. There are German Kieses, Dutch Kieses, and even Scottish Kieses. And I saw a website that explained that the Geis name is related to the Kies name. Which means there might be even more of us.
In Dutch, the word "kies" means molar, and one of the old Dutch Kies families has teeth on their coat of arms. In German, "kies" means gravel or pyrite (fool's gold is iron pyrite). I'm not sure how either word would have become our family name. And now I have discovered that the Luxembourg records have the name spelled Kays, Kees, Koehs, Koes...

Kies Immigration Tree - goes back 9 generations.
Kies Sibling Tree.
Kies Cemeteries
Kies Map
Family Photos

Useful Links for Kies Research: Dubuque County, IA
Sheboygan County, WI
Luxembourg

My email is lkies@jumpgate.net.