In Germany, land was passed on to succeeding generations in many different ways. Some regions, including the Kraichgau, in southwest Germany, practiced partible inheritance for much longer periods of time than in other regions. There were several reasons for this. During the 1600's, the wars reduced the population severely and land was plentiful. This encouraged parents, who had acquired large parcels of land, to divide their holdings among several children.
Changes took place during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. At the end of The Thirty Year's War , the population was so reduced that more land was available than could be used. The villagers tended to use the land nearer to the village. The outlying land, which formed a boundary to the next parish, was often not used. Boundary lines between the parishes were forgotten. Later, when the land was needed, it had been forgotten whose land it was, which led, in some cases, to "wars" between the parishes over their boundaries.
The rulers, wanting more tax money, invited, or actually recruited, people from farther away to move in. (This was probably when several of our ancestors moved into southwest Germany, from other regions, maybe even from other countries.) With fewer wars, and a more stable economy, the natural population grew and was augmented by the influx of people. After one or two generations, the demand for land again exceeded its availability. All during this period, up into the eighteenth century, partible inheritance was maintained in the Kraichgau, even though it had been abandoned in some regions of Germany. Newer practices in farming helped some, as the average size of fields decreased, but the people in the Kraichgau hung on to partible inheritance.
By 1724, the government in Karlsruhe forbid immigration into the area controlled by it, just because the pressures were becoming too great. Other measures adopted prohibited marriage before the age of 25, and the division of land into parcels of less than a certain size. At the extreme, fields could not be less than one-fifth of an acre, and a garden tract could not be less than one-eighth of an acre.
These problems were nothing new. For centuries, populations had built up to a level which could not be sustained. The general solution in these cases had been emigration. This had been going on for centuries before America was even dreamed of. The emigration then had been to the east. Even during the eighteenth century, as emigration increased to America, the levels of immigration to the east remained high. This occurred in the early fourteenth century, and in the sixteenth century, before the better known emigration of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. So your German cousins are scattered from here to The Steppes of Russia or to the Ukraine. ( Reference "The Volga Germans", who immigrated to Russia during the reign of Peter The Great .)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.