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Two States, One Valley

Linse, Thran and Halle lay in the Duchy of Brunswick (Herzogtum Braunschweig). Bodenwerder, two kilometers away, did not. That one fact explains much of what follows in the Wesemann Family and The German Mills sections.

The Duchy was not one compact block of land. In the form the Congress of Vienna gave it in 1815, it was bordered on the north, south and west by the Kingdom of Hannover. It owned five pieces of land lying inside other states, and it surrounded pieces belonging to its neighbors. Bodenwerder was one of these: a Hanoverian town sitting inside Brunswick territory. Here the border ran between villages, not around a region.

Hannover stayed a kingdom until Prussia annexed it in 1866. Brunswick lasted as a state, through the North German Confederation and the German Empire, until 1918. From 1815 to 1866 the two were separate countries, each with its own army, laws, courts, church and records. A family at Linse dealt with Brunswick offices; a family at Bodenwerder dealt with Hanoverian ones.

Inside Brunswick, the unit that mattered was the district office (Amt). It handled both government and justice for a group of villages. Linse and Thran belonged to the district of Wickensen, in a subgroup of fifteen villages called the Lower Börde (Niedere Börde). The records a family made here were filed under the district, not the village.

Brunswick reorganized these offices twice in the family’s time. A temporary plan of March 1814 set up two city courts and nineteen district courts under six senior offices. A reform of 1823, in force from 1 October 1825, divided the Duchy into six districts with twenty-two district offices beneath them. In 1832 the districts were renamed Kreise and the district offices Amtsbezirke. The Holzminden district office (Kreisdirektion Holzminden), which handled George Wesemann’s emigration in 1860, came out of these changes.

The state was also a landlord. Where a holding owed its hereditary rent to the district office rather than to a private lord, the same office that taxed and judged a family also granted its living, and could take it back. Later in the 1800s the state estates office (Domänenamt) took over this role. That is why the files on a mill sit in the state archive at Wolfenbüttel and not in a private family archive.

The French Years

For six years the district was not in Brunswick at all. After the Peace of Tilsit in 1807, Napoleon built a Kingdom of Westphalia out of Hessian, Hanoverian, Brunswick and Prussian lands and made his brother Jérôme king, at Kassel. Holzminden fell into the district of Einbeck in the department of the Leine. French-style cantons replaced the old districts. Linse was in the canton of Halle, and Grünenplan, twenty-five kilometers away, in the canton of Delligsen. For those six years no state border separated them.

The new kingdom brought civil registration under the French civil code. Births, marriages and deaths went into civil registers (Zivilstandsregister) kept by the mayor, or in some places by Protestant clergy acting as civil officers, apart from the church books. That is why a Lutheran pastor of the district might note a civil register in the margin of his own baptism entry. The kingdom fell in 1813, and in most of its former lands civil registration stopped with it until the 1870s. For six years, the state, not the church, kept the main record.

The Church Map

Brunswick and Hannover each had its own Lutheran state church, governed from Wolfenbüttel and from Hannover. A law passed by one did not touch the other. To know which church office oversaw a congregation, you have to look at the church map, not the political one.

Small villages were often served as chapels of a larger parish. A chapel had its own building and sometimes its own register, but its fuller records were kept in the mother parish’s books. Linse was a chapel of Halle. Its people appear in the Halle books until 1814 and in Linse’s own book from 1815, and the Linse catalog entry says “the rest is in Halle” (übriges siehe Halle).

Church districts also crossed political lines. A congregation could belong to one church district while a clergyman from another town, even one across a state border, served it from week to week. From 1569 the church inspection of Halle (Spezialsuperintendentur Halle) covered, within the district of Wickensen, the parishes of Vorwohle, Wangelnstedt, Deensen, Eschershausen, Kirchbrak, Dielmissen, Halle (with its chapels at Dohnsen, Linse and Tuchtfeld), Heyen, Harderode, Bisperode, Bessingen and Hehlen. It also covered the court district of Ottenstein, the two parishes of Stadtoldendorf, and the old monastery district of Kemnade, which was served from Bodenwerder. Kirchbrak and Halle with Linse were therefore in the same church inspection, under the same district office, on the same river, from the 1500s on. One milling household could baptize its children in three registers, at Halle and Linse, Kemnade and Kirchbrak, without ever leaving its own district.