On the last 21 of October, the Pennsylvania Chapter of Palatines to America held their fall conference with Larry O. Jensen as the speaker. Never has any speaker given me such an inferiority complex. The breadth and extent of his knowledge were overwhelming and showed me how little that I know.
Mr. Jensen is on the staff at the Family History Library of the LDS in Salt Lake City, though he does do some teaching outside the library. If you ever have the chance to hear him, take advantage of the opportunity. Most everything that he talked about had many elements that were new to me.
Consider German records and their sources. One must understand that there are many different types of jurisdictions that created these records. One classification was the nobility jurisdictions. The nobility ruled lands acquired by inheritance, marriage, or military force. The records that they created often pertained to these subjects for all of the people living in their jurisdictions. These might be a duchy, kingdom, province, principality. Baden for example was a duchy, while Wuerttemberg was a kingdom. Other types of nobility jurisdictions were archduchy, county, grand principality, domain, and landgravate. At the time of the unification of German, Prussia had many provinces such as Rheinland, Hessen-Nassau, Westfalen, and many more.
Separate from the nobility jurisdictions, even though they were often controlled by the nobility, were the government jurisdictions. These maintained specific regional, county, and district types of records. Not every government jurisdiction had the same divisions. Baden had counties (Kreis) and districts; Bavaria had regions and counties, but not districts; Anhalt had counties, but no regions or districts. The government jurisdictions usually had court records, military records, civil registry, and parish registers.
The Meyers Gazetteer recognizes the nobility divisions, the government divisions, the record types which are maintained. For example, the entry for Bruesenhagen identifies it as a Dorf or village in the Kingdom of Prussia in the Brandenburg province. The county records for Bruesenhagen are at Potsdam. The Kreis or district records are at Ostprignitz, while the lower court records are at Kyritz. The military records are at Pereleberg, and the civil registry is at Vehlow. The local government office records are kept at Dannenwalde. Most Americans ignore records other than the parish records. In doing so they may be omitting records which would be helpful in tracing a family.
In addition to these official divisions, there are cultural divisions which are not well defined. For example, the Kraichgau, which we discussed some Notes back, is a cultural area. These cultural areas can be important since a person may identify himself with a cultural area.
(08 Nov 06)
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.