mike gregory - Posted - 05/23/2025:  23:10:16

That was the first name of the uncle who gave me his old Slingerland plectrum banjo, which happened about 1961.

Start of a fun journey, and here I am, all those years later, playing banjo for MONEY, and MAKING banjos, and MARRIED TO a banjo player.

The 23rd of May, 1881 was his birthday.
World War ONE veteran. Went around with some kind of mobile telephone switchboard- not a radio- on his back, or so I've been told.

He was from Burlington, in Alamance County , Virginia.
I know that folks around there sometimes give an honored family LAST name as somebody's FIRST name, so first, or last, I just wonder.

Freyher V. Williams.

When he died, my aunt asked if I'd play his banjo at the funeral.
Lucky me, the only three chords I knew back then, were all it took to play the Kingston Trio's funeral appropriate "When I'm On My Journey, Don't You Weep After Me".

mike gregory - Posted - 05/24/2025:  11:51:26

An OutHanger who may prefer to remain anonymous, was nice enough to send me a link to a name search site, but the site demanded I accept cookies, so, instead, I went to AOL Images.
Bunches of pix of people, with captions in German.

Turns out that Freyher is a family name in Germany, so, my guess that he got his first name from some relative's LAST name seems to be good.
Well, good enough for MY curiosity to be satisfied.

rinemb - Posted - 05/24/2025:  15:13:28

Nice story.

rinemb - Posted - 05/24/2025:  15:17:11

I am familiar with the German civic name Frey. Around here pronounced Fry. So that name would likely be called fryer. But those Germans have so many spoken and written dialects. My wife’s mother is from Saarland now known as west Germany. Much different from those Eastern and southern Germans…as I understand it all. Brad

5Stringtrout - Posted - 05/25/2025:  12:14:44

Burlington is Alamance County North Carolina. The origin of the name is either Native American or comes from the Alamani region of Rhineland, Germany, where many of the early settlers came from.

Tim Jumper - Posted - 05/25/2025:  13:43:45

Mike,
Is that K. Trio song from the Bahamas? -- which I learned as "When I'm Dead and Buried Don't You Weep after Me," and is a great three-chord hymn!

VioletMoon - Posted - 05/28/2025:  20:26:09

FamilySearch Tree suggests he might have been named after a grandfather, Frehyer B. Williams (1850-1889) but I don't see a Frehyer surname in the fan chart (and I haven't confirmed the accuracy of the tree).