The surname Grunewald means "green forest" from German grune "green", wald "forest".

The ancient German region of the Rhineland was the original home of the name Grunewald, a type of hereditary surname that identified people by the places where they lived.

Thousands of Europeans, Rhinelanders included, came to America between the 17th and 20th centuries. It was an escape from religious persecution and poverty and an opportunity for people to start over and own their own land. One of the early arrivals in Pennsylvania was Heinrich Grunewald in 1738. Abraham Greenawalt, age 40, arrived on the ship, Lydia, in 1740; Fredrick Grunewald, on the ship, Edinburgh in 1751, and many others.

The first mention that we have of John Grunewald, whose descendants are in this family tree, is in the "Goshenhoppen Registers, 1741-1819", on page 17. It is of his marriage to Anna Barbara Schmidt, daughter of Philip Schmidt and Eva Kuhn, on June 18th, 1765.

The "Goshenhoppen Registers, 1741-1819" belonged formerly to the old mission church of St. Paul, known since 1837 as the church of the Most Blessed Sacrament, at Goshenhoppen, now Bally, in Washington Township, Berks County, Penna. They contain the records of the baptisms, conversions, marriages, deaths and burials kept by the Jesuit priests, Rev. Theodore Schneider and his successor, Rev. John Baptist Ritter, who for forty-four years, from 1741 to 1785, were in charge of Goshenhoppen and its outlying missions. In it are the records of many of our ancestors, Aaron, Cyphert, Greenawalt, Reinsel, Walley and many others.