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Names and Rank in the Village

Names

Children were baptized with two, three or four given names, but each person went by only one of them, the call name (Rufname). It was not always the first. A man baptized Heinrich Christian Ludewig might be Ludewig in every later record. A woman baptized Christiane Friederike Minna might be Luise to the whole parish, and her marriage entry might say so. This cuts both ways. Ludewig Wesemann and Heinrich Christian Ludewig Wesemann may be one man, and two men called Ludewig may be a father and son who shared one name of three. Even the order of names could change: Justine Marie and Marie Justine are one woman in two clerks’ hands.

The stock of names was small. Heinrich, Johann, Christian, Ludewig, Georg, Wilhelm, Ernst and Friedrich served for men; Marie, Caroline, Justine, Louise, Wilhelmine, Dorothea and Christine for women. Families used the same few, in new combinations, generation after generation. Children were named for grandparents, for a parent and for godparents, and the name of a baby who died was often given to the next child of the same sex. A village of two hundred people could hold several living men with the same first name and surname, and no one was confused, because everyone knew them by house, trade or father. The clerks told them apart the same way, by trade, village, house number, or “senior” and “junior.”

Women are the hardest people to follow. A woman appears under her maiden name at baptism and at marriage, under her husband’s name during her married life, and often under both at her death. A godmother entered as a man’s wife is married; a godmother entered under her own given name usually is not.

No office fixed the spelling of a surname until civil registration began. A clerk wrote what he heard, with nothing to check it against. In one parish the same family could be written three ways. At Schwiegershausen, in Grubenhagen, the same men are Wasman in the baptisms, Wasmann or Warmann in the marriages, and Warmann in the burials of the 1750s, because a clerk’s short middle s can look like an r. That the Warmann and Wasman entries are one family is probably true for three men whose baptisms, marriages and burials tie together. A surname could also be changed by choice. At Halle in 1787 a groom was entered as “Hans Herman Lüddeke (oder Heibein),” with a note that his true family name was Heibein and that he had taken the name his grandfather used. Chapter 13 of the family history book tells how all this touched the name Wesemann.

Rank

A north German village was a ranked society, and the rank words in the registers are not job titles. They are positions, each with its own land, its own duties to the lord and its own rights in the village.

At the top were the arable farmers (Meier), graded by the size of their holdings and their rights in the common land: full farmers (Vollmeier), half farmers (Halbmeier), quarter farmers, and in some places eighth farmers. With no formal political rights in the village, it was the full farmers who in practice set its order. The grades were measured in labor as well as land. In one village of this district a full farmer owed thirty-seven days a year of team work, with two horses, tackle and food for man and beast. A half farmer owed eighteen and a half days, a large cottager forty-four and a half days of hand labor, a small cottager twenty-two and a quarter, and a smallholder eleven. In this region a half farmer was also called a Halbspänner, after the half team of two horses he had to supply.

Below the farmers came the cottagers (Köter, in large and small grades), who held a few acres, enough to keep a household that also did other work. Below them were the smallholders (Brinksitzer). They had a house and usually one to five acres of meadow, little or no good farmland, and lived by a craft: turner, shoemaker, butcher, sawyer or day laborer. The class grew up because farms could not be divided. Younger sons who could not find places as farm servants had to make their own way.

Lowest were the landless. A lodger (Häusling) rented rooms in someone else’s building and worked by the day on farms or in a trade. Below him were the live-in farm servants, who worked for board, clothing, a bed and a small yearly wage. None of these people belonged to the village’s body of respectable householders (Dorfehrbarkeit); they had no say in village affairs. To be called a lodger did not mean a man had a small house. It meant he stood outside the group that made decisions. And the landless were not a few. In one village of the district, about 44 percent of the men were smallholders and about 41 percent lodgers. A family that fell out of the landholding classes joined the majority, which is exactly why the fall was so hard to undo.

A farmer who handed his holding to an heir in his own lifetime retired on a settlement charged to the farm (Leibzucht): a room or cottage, a yearly allowance of grain and goods, sometimes a garden. Such a man was called a Leibzüchter. The word names an arrangement, not a trade, and a man so styled had a successor, usually a son.

Land and the Buyout

Most farmland here was held under a hereditary tenure called Meierrecht. The holder paid a yearly rent (Meierzins) to the lord, and the farm passed undivided to one heir. He was secure in practice but did not own the land, and a holder could be removed for unpaid rent or bad management. Rent might be owed to the district office, to a private estate or to the church, and one household could owe rent to a lord above it while collecting rent from a smaller holder below.

In the 1800s Brunswick bought this system out. It issued its first law on dividing common land on 25 March 1823, a new constitution on 12 October 1832, and a redemption law on 20 December 1834. Under the reforms of 1834 to 1840, any burden owed to a lord, a tithe owner or the district office could be paid off in cash, turned into a money rent, or settled by giving up as much as a sixth of the land. By 1850 the buyout of labor and tithes was largely done, and farmers owned their land outright. After that, a farm no longer passed automatically to the eldest son; the owner could leave it to any child, a daughter included. The buyout files name the holder, the holding and the creditor, which makes them some of the most useful state records for a rural family of the 1800s.

House Numbers and Measures

The “Nr. ass.” in the records is not a street address. It is the fire-insurance number (Assekuranznummer). Duke Carl I’s ordinance of 18 July 1753 founded a fire-insurance society for Brunswick, working from 1 July 1754, and it numbered every building in the state. The numbers ran along one side of a village street and back along the other, with new numbers for new buildings. Villages had no street names, so the insurance number was the address. Because it belonged to the building and not the family, it follows a holding across generations and changes of surname. Linse Nr. ass. 1 is one particular farm, whoever lived on it.

Land was measured in Morgen, an area that varied by territory but was commonly about a quarter of a hectare. A Hufe, the classic full farm, was about thirty Morgen. A full farmer held two or three Hufen, a half farmer about one, and a cottager anything from two to thirty Morgen. By that measure the eighteen and a half Morgen of the Thran mill was a smallholding. A mill’s value lay in its wheel and its water right, not in its land.