| Hello William,
This is Karsten Schwulst from Germany. I'm the owner of the schwulst.com-domain for some time now, at the moment mainly to have good email-addresses for me and my family. I was born in 1971 in Dessau in East Germany and I'm a psychologist. My Grandfather Bernhard was born in 1903 in the German state Mecklenburg (I don't know the exact location, would have to ask my father) in the north of East Germany. He didn't know his real father (the one named Schwulst), since he was adopted by another family. He moved to Luckenwalde (south of Berlin) in the 1920s and had 3 sons (Peter 1933, Hartmut 1935, Bernhard 1943 - my father) and one daughter (Almuth 1938). He died at the age of 93 in 1997. He was the chief of the gymnasts in Luckenwalde and even held the olympic flame in his hands for a mile or so in 1936. All his children are still alive and well. We were 9 cousins, but one of us - Ingo - unfortunately died in a car crash a few years ago. There are about 30 entries for Schwulst in the German telephone directory. 7 alone are from my grandfather's family tree. Last year I called up a radio station with a famous names-expert, a German professor. He told me on the radio, that the name is an old German word and means something like a swelling or growth on the human body. Not very nice, huh? Well, maybe our 1st forefather had something like this. :o) Today the word GESCHWULST still exists in German and it means basically the same. but the word Schwulst is a lot older than Geschwulst - so the theory about Gaschwulst as the origin should be pretty obsolete. Besides that, from the spread of phone numbers over here it seems pretty sure that our whole family stems from the north of Germany. All the best for now! Karsten
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