All chroniclers of the name "Messikommer" point to documents from the hamlet "Mesikon", where it is asserted that a castle stood, from which neither documents nor remains have ever been found. The concern is over houses situated on the Brandbach which empties into the [river] Kempt between Feraltorf and Illnau.
In 1547 the chronicler Johannes Stumpf wrote the following about the environs of Kyburg:
"There are still many ruins of castle stables and residences of aristocrats or noble farmers situated around Kyburg, such that, within a radius of a good mile I could locate 70 stables and estates which the named family and Noblemen had kept, who were mostly servants to the Lords of Kyburg. Without doubt these people lived with minimal luxuries (not like the Nobles of our day) in their housekeeping, and supported themselves mostly by their wares, their livestock and their fields. There is also hardly a loss of one of these castles due to war, rather mostly through neglect and abandonment: neither were they the sturdiest of homes, yet one was better than the next. These noblemen should have lived in splendor, as is the right of our nobles, but the earth of this area could not support them.
A little below the Kyburg castle, on the left side, the [river] Toess widens into a very fruitful and fish-laden stream named the Kempt, creating a wonderful valley next to Kyburg upwards of a mile long, circling about the town Altorff, which also has a merry castle situated on flat land surrounded by two water-filled moats and one dry gulley.
The ditches are still exposed but the old castle on the grounds is destroyed and recently a farmhouse has been built in its place. Directly below Altorff, on the right side towards Kyburg, on the roadway, lay the hamlet of Mesickon, which also had a castle, although everything is gone. By one..."
The development of the family name can best be illustrated by the enclosed examples "Documents before 1500" and the entries in the first church chronicles of Weisslingen.
The oldest documents known are from the year 745 (example 1 and 2). Both were issued on the same day, September 10th, the first in Grafstall and the other in Illnau. The same location name is spelled differently in the two documents. Various historians trace this name back to "Maginso", the alemanic expression meaning "the strong". Hence, the location name signifies "farm of the strong".
updated 9 April 2003