Origin of the name:
The family name "Reitelbach / Reidelbach" is a geographical family name type, whose origin is almost for sure the name of one of the two villages in Germany, whose names sound the same, but are written differently. These are 64686 Raidelbach (in the region called "Odenwald", 50 km south of Francfort) or 66687 Reidelbach (in the region called "Hunsrück", 30 km southeast of Trier or 130 km southwest of Francfort). That means, that this family name could have been given to different persons, who left these villages and settled into others in the late Middle Ages, when the use of family names began in Germany.
Spreading nowadays:
The name "Reitelbach" is listed 31 times on a Germany telephonelist dated on the 8th of may 2003. On the same list there are 144 people with the name "Reidelbach". Also in the United States the two names are not very often used. So that the name "Reitelbach / Reidelbach" is very rare. That is not surprising, because the two mentioned villages are very small nowadays and were never bigger. Except my young Reitelbach- family here in Spain, the family name "Reitelbach" is nowadays used outside of Germany only in the United States. In the case of the name "Reidelbach" the situation is probably the same. As by entering the United States the spelling of the family names of the new immigrants could have been changed, persons living in the United States or in Canada named "Reitelbach", "Reidelbach", "Reidelback", "Reidleback"... can be part of my family. I estimate that there are no more than 1000 people all over the world named "Reitelbach" or "Reidelbach". These 1000 people seem to belong to only a few different families. It may be possible that they all belong together, but I doubt it.
My Reitelbach / Reidelbach family:
My forefathers wrote their name since 1800 "Reitelbach" and all of them lived from the beginning of the 18th century in the village "Frauenroth", which belongs to the municipality of "Burkardroth" in the bavarian part of the low mountains called "Rhön", which is more or less 100 km in the east of Francfort. Until 1800 my forefathers wrote their name "Reidelbach". The village "Frauenroth" is not the original one, because my forefather Johann Reidelbach (born before 1700 and grandson of the oldest forefather Lorenz Reidelbach) moved from the near village "Oberbach" (belongs to the municipality of "Wildflecken", near "Bad Brückenau") to "Frauenroth". I have checked the oldest archives of Oberbach and the result was, that all Reidelbachs who were born in Oberbach from 1650 to 1800 are descendants of this man and his 6 children (Conrad, Christina, Catharina, Michael, Anna and Johannes). Unfortunately yet the sons Michael and Johannes gave the same names to their children, so that it was not possible to get the complete list of descendants just by checking the registers of the books. Maybe this will be possible by checking the book entrances themselves, but as their are so many Johannes Reidelbach (yet in the third generation their are also two families Johannes and Catharina Reidelbach, so that it is not possible to know to whom of that two families belong children born from Johannes and Catharina Reidelbach) it will cost more time to check it. Nowadays, different families named "Reidelbach" still live in Oberbach, but it was not possible to check yet, whether they belong to my family or not. But as the probability of someone named Reidelbach moving to that village is very small quite surely all of them are also descendants of Lorenz Reidelbach. A lot of people named "Reitelbach" or "Reidelbach" living in the United States are descendants of the two cousins "August Reidelbach" and "Karl Reidelbach", who left "Oberbach" together with their brothers "Josef Reidelbach" and "Catharina Frohnapfel, born Reidelbach" between 1850 and 1860 and went to Virginia. Also from my family the following men left "Frauenroth" and went to the United States (there were also some women): Albin Reitelbach, born 1901, who lived in Ohio; Kaspar Reitelbach, born 1861; and a son of Kaspar Reidelbach, born 1789.