Were does the last name goselmen come from?

Question:

Were does the last name goselmen come from?

Thats my dads real last name and i was just wondering were it comes from

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: You do have a problem on your hands and the first advice given to start a detailed search working back generation by generation is the only way that you are going to get any real success.

Searches in Ancestry.com , Familysearch.org, and Rootsweb.org turned up NO hits for the last name Goselmen so you might consider entering another question when this one is done with as much detail as possible on your father and grandfather and see if we can help from more information.

If we move to the soundex version of your name (soundex is an effort to pick names that "sound like" what your target is) we get a wide variety however the best approximation seems to be Gosselin which is a French name (Norman really) and therefore people immigrating to the US with that name came from both England and France.

However the "root" of the name appears to Gosse, which is German:

Gosse
English (of Norman origin), French, and North German: from the Old French personal name Gosse, representing the Germanic personal name Gozzo, a short form of the various compound names beginning god ??good?? or god, got ??god??.

so a rough "translation" of your name is "God man" or "Good man".

Anyway, that's the best possible at this time, send in another question with more details and see what happens. Don't be surprised if in a thorough trace back of your ancestry that the spelling of the name is quite variable and that at certain stages even brothers and sisters in the same generation have a different way of spelling it.