Around the time of Elvis Presley's death several professional genealogists began looking into his ancestry. It was only natural that they initially assume that the family was of English, or Scotch-Irish origin, since Presley is, in fact, an English surname. Some of the assumptions which they then made had no basis in fact and have since been proven to be erroneous. Nevertheless, the misunderstanding continues to be repeated.

It has long been clear that the family roots go back to North Carolina, but from there the trail was always lost. As time has passed, other family historians have undertaken the research of their own branches of the Presley family tree. In the process, it has become clear that the trail leads back not to some long-forgotten Irishman or Englishman, but to a German-speaking immigrant named Pressler from The Rhineland, who came with his family, and hundreds of other desperate people, searching for a better life in the new world.

The American dream of freedom and economic success was reached in varying degrees by the immigrant and his descendants, but certainly no where more so than at Graceland. Yet, the trail leading to realization of that dream was one of hardship and struggle. Along the way there were oceans to be crossed, diseases to be overcome, wars to be fought, deaths to be suffered, frontier settlement to be made, isolation and ignorance to be endured, and separation of families to be experienced. Finally, as the generations and the years passed, the man who began the great adventure was no longer remembered. The stories of the earlier hardships were no longer related to the younger generations. Even the family name became mispronounced, anglicized and finally forgotten.

In early-day America, many people were illiterate, and so clerks would record their names phonetically in the way that they thought they heard a person pronounce it. With immigrants of foreign accent, with backwoodsmen and rural people of little education and poor diction, is it any wonder that misunderstandings would occur? When subsequent generations became literate, they often simply adopted the spelling of their surnames which earlier more educated people had used.

In the case of the Pressler surname, there were already two variations of spelling in Germany. This was known to be true in the same village. The usual explanation that is given is that in at least some German dialects, a "B" and a "P" are pronounced very much alike, if not identically. If that be the case, the distinction between Bressler and Pressler would be even less noticeable in English-speaking colonial America.

Such variations as Presler and Preslar could be expected where names were so often being spelled phonetically. Careless enunciation, or less than diligent clerks, might easily result in the failure to hear a final "r" on the surname, and thus it might be recorded as Presley, Presly, Pressley, or Pressly. These were all variants of a surname already known to the English-speaking community.

This book has been written to reveal the true origins of the Presley family and to identify the original family surname. It is common that families who first immigrated to America two or three centuries ago may have forgotten their Old World roots, and this was the case in the Pressler/Presley family, but the degree of the loss of a sense of family continuity by the branch of the family of Elvis Presley was profound.

The authors of this book hope to tell something, even if briefly, about how this situation developed, and to inform the reader as to how the great adventure began almost 300 years ago. It is not a complete history of the Presley family, the undertaking of which would be a much greater effort. It is rather the story of the immigrant family, and an indication of how their descendant, Elvis Presley, might have taken considerable pride in the knowledge of the story, had some fragment of knowledge about the family's origins and the struggles they endured been passed down to him. It is the beginning of the Presley story.

© 1997 Donald W. Presley.   Reproduction of this material for commercial purposes is prohibited without written permission of Donald W. Presley.  No claim is made to previously copyrighted material.  Elvis, Elvis Presley, and Graceland are registered trademarks of Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc.

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