Hi there!
I´m from Patagonia Argentina. My Ghelfi ancestors came here (to the province of Santa Fe) over 100 years ago.
I´m now researching and tracing down my family to it´s very origins...
I´ve found quite a few different versions already... The one I find most of the times is that of the WELFs but I´ve also found that we come from a "merge" of Ghibellin + Guelfs and that´s when we got the H after G... but I´m not sure about this because according to historical facts the Guelfs and the Ghibellins were opposite parties...
I found a website,
www.ghelfi.net that say:
Guelfs & Ghibellines divide Florence
During the period of the Communes (~ 1200 D.C.), Florence was divided by internal conflicts among the richest families and two factions were formed:
Guelfs, representing the middle classes, supported the autonomy of the Communes against the emperor;
Ghibellines, representing the nobles, supported the emperor.
The Ghibellines, with the help of Frederick II (grandson of Frederick Barbarossa) won the first round and banished the Guelfs from the city (1249).
A year later, upon the death of Frederick II, the Guelphs gained power and formed the government of the Primo Popolo (or government of the Old People).
After ten years the Guelphs were defeated in the Montaperti Battle (1260) by Ghibellines, helped by Manfredi, son of Frederick II.
Upon the death of Manfredi and his grandson Corradino, the Guelphs regained power.
They formed the government of the Secondo Popolo and in 1282 entrusted the government to the Priors of the Guilds.
Florence became a rich and powerful city.
Guelfs and Ghibellines
Labels attached to Italian political factions in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They derived respectively from the German Welf (a Bavarian family that competed for the German throne against the Hohenstaufen in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries) and Waiblingen (a Hohenstaufen castle). Originating as factional names in Florence, the terms were first widely used during Emperor Frederick II's conflict with the papacy (1227-50), when a Guelf opposed the claims of the Hohenstaufen emperor to authority in Italy and was sympathetic to the pope, while a Ghibelline supported Frederick. Already, however, they were also convenient tags for inter- or intra-city political rivalries, and their original function was lost with the extinction of the direct Hohenstaufen line in 1268. The Guelf label then became associated with French ambitions and with political conservatism, while, in the early fourteenth century, the Visconti of Milan and della Scala of Verona emerged as the leading Ghibellines. The last conflict in Italy between the empire and papacy, in the reign of Louis of Bavaria (1324-47), temporarily revived the original significance of the terms. Thereafter their importance rapidly declined.
Italian political terms derived from the German Welf, a personal and thence family name of the dukes of Bavaria, and Waiblingen, the name of a castle of the Hohenstaufen dukes of Swabia apparently used as a battle cry. Presumably introduced into Italy 1198-1218, when partisans of the Emperor Otto IV (Welf) contested central Italy with supporters of Philip of Swabia and his' nephew Frederick II, the terms do not appear in the chronicles until the Emperor Frederick's conflict with the Papacy 1235-50, when Guelf meant a supporter of the Pope and Ghibelline a supporter of the Empire. From 1266 to 1268, when Naples was conquered by Charles of Anjou, brother of Louis IX, the French connection became the touchstone of Guelfism, and the chain of Guelf alliances stretching from Naples, through central Italy, to Provence and Paris, underwritten by the financial interests of the Tuscan bankers, became an abiding feature of European politics. The Italian expeditions of Henry of Luxemburg (1310-13) and Lewis of Bavaria (1327-29) spread the terms to northern Italy, with the Visconti of Milan and the della Scala of Verona emerging as the leading Ghibelline powers. Attempts by Guelf propagandists to claim their party as the upholder of liberty and their opponents as the protagonists of tyranny rarely coincide with the truth: power politics, then as now, generally overrode ideology in inter-state affairs.
Factional struggles had existed within the Italian states from time immemorial, the parties taking a multitude of local names. In Florence, however, Guelf and Ghibelline were applied to the local factions which supposedly originated in a feud between the Buondelmonte and Amidei clans, c. 1216. In 1266-67 the Guelf party, which had recruited most of the merchant class, finally prevailed over the predominantly noble Ghibellines; after this, internal factions in Florence went under other names, like the Blacks and the Whites who contested for control of the commune between 1295 and 1302. Meanwhile the Parte Guelfa had become a corporate body whose wealth and moral authority as the guardian of political orthodoxy enabled it to play the part of a powerful pressure group through most of the 14th century. After the War of the Eight Saints, the influence of the Parte declined rapidly. Although its palace was rebuilt c. 1418-58 to the designs of Brunelleschi, it had no part in the conflicts surrounding the rise of the Medici régime.
On another website (
http://www.cognomiitaliani.org/cognomi/cognomi0007es.htm) I found this:
Ghelfi è diffuso in Lombardia, Emilia e Romagna, Liguria orientale e Toscana occidentale, dovrebbe derivare dal nome medioevale italiano Guelfus, riscontrabile ad esempio a Pisa, nel censimento dei focolari del 1291 si trova Guelfus de Camuliano, sempre a Pisa in un atto del 1345 leggiamo: "...Anno Domini millesimo trecentesimo quadragesimo quinto, indictione tertia decima, die quarta decima mensis madii. Pateat omnibus evidenter quod Guelfus domini Iacobi Gualterotti de Lanfranchis de Pisis pro se ipso et suo proprio et privato nomine...", tracce di questa cognominizzazione si trovano nell'elenco degli scolari dell'Università di Perugia nel 1511 con un certo Salvator Guelfus della provincia romana.
integrazioni fornite da Giovanni Vezzelli
Ghelfi è un cognome diffuso nel Riminese. Sono ipotizzabili due derivazioni: 1. dal sostantivo italiano Guelfo, affermatosi nel Medioevo, che viene dal germanico *welf, denominazione del capostipite della casa di Baviera, il quale ha originato anche il gotico wulfs = lupo (tedesco Wolf). 2. dal longobardo waifa = bosco, terreno di nessuno.
Well, that´s what I have so far
If anyone has anything else to add, please let me know.
I´m trying to gather as much information as possible and from there I´m planning on creating an entire family tree that will include all current generations of Ghelfis... ambitious but yet feasible with the help of all of us, Ghelfis in the world.
(there´s a facebook group GHELFI NEL MONDO... if you are one, please join :)