I am happy to see that Jacques has posted here in our American Ancestry site! My name is Becky Ettel Burnard, d/o Calvin and Annabel Ettel, descendent of Christoph and IN Ettels. Jacques Ettel posted to the Web his extensive collection of genealogy information in the two URL's in his posting. Buried in his wealth of information (12,000 names!) is the missing information between the German Ettel family that immigrated to the US and the French Ettel family. He has travelled extensively in France and Germany seeking and verifying his information. It gets a bit sketchy on the US side. Basic info is that several siblings married into French families and came just south of Dorrenbach to small towns in the Alsace and Lorraine areas of what is now France. Dad and I have been slowly working through the MN and CA Ettels, and think that most everyone we have talked to ties in to the French and German branches of this same family, with the major exception of the OEttel clan. Haven't been able to work them together.
I had the honor and pleasure of visiting with Jacques in July after a business trip to Paris. It was such a special time, and our cousins in France and Germany are as warm and friendly as those in the US. His work is worth the effort to transcribe, or use Google's language translation to gain a pretty good translation on the fly--it allows you to view html in English even when written in French.