A number of people seem to have found my site searching for information on Gonderic, a rather obscure king of the Vandals, who reigned from approximately 406-428 AD. To be honest, I'm not much of a history buff, I just found the name in a genealogy table one day, thought it sounded cool, and stuck it on my website. But, after seeing the number of people who find my site looking for information on him, I decided to do a little research. So here are my findings, and I hope this is helpful!
For some general background, check out the Wikipedia article on the Vandals. The high point is their sack of Rome in 455 under King Genseric, known as the "Spear King".
Here's where things get murky.
The web is full of genealogy tables mentioning the name "Gonderic" some of which have some limited information. The database on genopro.com records the descendents of Gonderic as follows:
Gonderic (b. 375 AD, d. 426 AD)-> Gensreic the Spear King (b. 389 AD, d. 476 AD)-> Hunneric (b. 440 AD, d. 484 AD).
The genealogy database on genealogy.com records the following:
Gonderic (b. 400 AD, d. 426 AD) -> Genseric (b. 419 AD, d. 477 AD) -> Huneric (b. 454 AD)
ancestry.com records the following:
Gonderic (b. 368 AD, d. 426 AD) -> Genseric (b. 399 AD, d. 477 AD) -> Hunneric (b. 445 AD, d. 485 AD)
Wikipedia, on the other hand, states that Genseric was the illegitimate son of Godigisel and was in fact the half-brother of a Gunderic. In the Wikipedia version, King Godigisel left the kingdom to his eldest son Gunderic, who was then succeeded by Genseric.
It seems reasonable to assume that Gunderic is indeed the same person as Gonderic. Since genealogy databases tend to scrape huge amounts of records, including the reigns of kings, it seems likely to me that they mistakenly recorded a kingly succession as parentage.
Solid sources are of course hard to come by on the Internet...
The best information I have found is probably this genealogy of Vandal Kings, which I presume was compiled by Ian Mladjov, who was (as of the most recent information I could find on the site) expecting to receive a PhD in History from the University of Michigan in 2006. (For those of you who are history or genealogy afficionados, he has an impressive list of chronologies and Genealogies available on his website.)
Mladjov's table table lists the reign of Gunderic as corresponding with the birth of "Gonderic" from several of the genealogy sites, so I would conclude that the genealogy sites are in error.
The most detailed (though arguably the most obscure) information I was able to find was on Google Books, and I would highly recommend it for anyone looking for more details.
Here are the most interesting links from my Google Book searching: