The Fahrenheits are a German Hanse merchant…

The Fahrenheits are a German Hanse merchant family who had lived in several Hanseatic cities.

Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit's great-grandfather had lived in Rostock, and research suggests that the Fahrenheit family originated in Hildesheim.

Daniel's grandfather had moved from Kneiphof in Königsberg (Kaliningrad) to Danzig and settled there as a merchant in 1650.

His son, Daniel Fahrenheit (the father of the inventor), had married Concordia Schumann, daughter of a well-known Danzig business family.

Their son Daniel is the eldest of the five Fahrenheit children (two sons, three daughters) who survive childhood.

His sister, Virginia Elizabeth Fahrenheit, marries Benjamin Ephraim Krueger of an aristocratic Danzig family.

Daniel Fahrenheit had begun training as a chemist in Amsterdam after his parents died on August 14, 1701, from eating poisonous mushrooms.

However, Fahrenheit's interest in natural science had led him to begin studies and experimentation in that field.

Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit in about 1713 switches from using alcohol to mercury as the thermometric fluid in his thermometers, creating the first mercury-in-glass thermometer.