I am researching the history of the Fleer family. In the LDS records I have discovered 11 children with surname FLEER and with parents Johann Caspar Brinkman and Anna Magdalene Bockermann. All Fleer children were christened at Schildesche, Westf., Preussen, between 1731 and 1734.
Can someone help me to understand how 11 Fleers can be christened over 14 years with a different parent surname?
David Fleer
Palatine IL USA
davelf2@attbi.com
Good morning,
This is a fairly normal phenomenon all over Westphalia when the farm name
differs from the family name, the children get the farm name
and the father would for instance be called J. C. Brinkmann, colon (= farmer)
Fleer.
It does not really matter how he got that farm, if it was from his parents
inlaw by heritage, from his maternal grandparents, or by purchase.
What mattered was the farm name and who lived there went by that farm name.
The only way he could change that was to leave the farm and e. g. open a shop or
the like.
For the tax collector it was a comfortable institution: he took his list that
would never have to be altered. The few new settlers in the community, mostly
children of farmers that had not inherited their parents farm because of better
rights of a sibling, would be added in the end of the list. As it would scarcen
their part of peat bog, woods, meadows etc. that were used commonly (like
"Greenham commons" in the U. K.), they watched closely that not too many new
farms or cottages were set up and would protest if that were tried.
Osnabrueck, that used to be part of Westphalia, had separate columns in their
birth/baptismal records: last name of the father a) by birth b) by farm name
Sincerely yours
Falk Liebezeit
Diepholz
where that was the rule until 1866, afterwards it was farmer so and so,
according to the farm name called (e. g.) Niemeier
In the villages, people still use the farm name instead of the "official" names
in everyday use to this very day.
Dave schrieb:
This is very interesting. If one wanted to 'check' on a farm name, and who
now owned it ... how would you do that (now Kreis Uelzen, Land
Niedersachsen)?
Bonita -- Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas