There were two May families, one early and one late. The earlier May family was a branch of the important Bacharach family which had lived in Frankfurt since 1516 but died out in 1745. The later May family was probably unrelated to the earlier one and only migrated to Frankfurt from Innsbruck in the Tyrol in 1740. The descendants of this later family made a great fortune from banking. In the year 1800 the banker Benedict Aaron May had a fortune of 135,000 guilders, and was the third richest man in the Judengasse. At that time Mayer Amschel Rothschild, the founder of the Rothschild Dynasty, was worth only 60,000 guilders.