A Park Named What?

There are some things which are so strange that you realize that if you discuss them, you won't be believed if you don't provide any evidence.  While driving back to Maryland from Indiana, I decided to go through southern Ohio and see for myself something I had learned about on the interwebz.  It's a park east of Circleville, OH with an ominous-sounding name that in a sense shouldn't be.

Let me say that the relevance of my adopted home state, such that this post deserves the label, will be explained below.  But first, let me show you the place I briefly visited, Martha Hitler Park.

The park includes a disc golf course and this pavilion, which may be used on a first come, first served basis.

If by now, you're wondering what's going on here, let me assure you that it's just about impossible for Martha Hitler to have been related to the frustrated Austrian painter who later became the genocidal dictator of Nazi Germany.  In fact, you could say that he and his family were not "real" Hitlers.

As his story goes, once upon a time in northern Austria, a woman named Maria Anna Schicklgruber became pregnant outside of marriage and gave birth to a son named Alois.  When her boy was about five years old, she married a man named Johann Georg Hiedler, who might have been his father.  Later on, for whatever reason, Alois Schicklgruber was allowed to adopt his (step)father's family name.  For whatever other reason, its spelling was changed from "Hiedler" to "Hitler".  Thus, Alois Schicklgruber became Alois Hitler, and later had a son named Adolf.  This means that in Austria, the name spelled "Hitler" goes back only two generations before its most infamous bearer.  The rest, including World War II and the Holocaust, is history.

Martha Hitler, on the other hand, was a member of a very different Hitler family.  As her story goes, a boy named George Hitler was born in 1763 in the British colony of Maryland (hence the "Maryland" label).  He grew up and moved to Pennsylvania, where he married a woman named Suzannah Gay.  They had four children, and then moved to Ohio, where they had seven more.  Martha Hitler descended from this large family, and donated the land that became her namesake park in her will.  Another member named Nelson Hitler donated money to establish and provide care for a school library.  Another member was a dentist named Dr. Gay Hitler, whose father (a son of George and Suzannah Hitler) had the full name of George Washington Hitler, which would be bizarre by today's standards., but back then would have been no more unusual than the name "George Washington Carver".

You can see why the names of Martha Hitler Park and several other things (mainly roads and a cemetery) named after her family really shouldn't be regarded as ominous.  These people lived decades before Adolf Hitler was born and don't deserve his infamy.

To learn more, go to the Circleville Herald, The Scioto Post and YNetNews.  There are still a few things I haven't been able to find out.  How long after the lifetimes of Martha, Nelson and Gay Hitler did any of their descendants keep using the name "Hitler".  I certainly wouldn't hold it against them for changing it.  And where did the ancestors of the family patriarch George Hitler come from?  Instead of being German or Austrian, could they have been English?