Hello everybody,
Morgen first: you will find more information about it on:
The German text gives more detail than the English one. The important thing to remember is that a Morgen is of different size in different areas and ages.
House numbers: this is a relatively recent idea. It began, I think, to spread more widely during the 18th century. Before the houses had no numbers, only house names which had in many cases replaced or been added to, the family names. People with house-cum-family names married into another house with a name of its own. So it became difficult to know exactly who lived where, and who was who!
Numbering then started usually round the church and/or the local administration, and so often the most distant farms got the highest numbers. At a given moment there were perhaps 120 houses in the village/township. When the next house was built, it got number 121, even if it was built on the grounds of say number 58, or next to number 6.
Later streetnames became common, but numbers first didn't follow. In Cologne they had numbers in the thousands (numberind was first introduced by the French around 1800) but the streets in the center are very short. Numbering at one end of each street was introduced much later.
Oh, I thought it was like a house number (location) but this makes sense
that it was given a number when it was built. So if I understand correctly,
it could be a house or a farm .. or was each house on a large farm given
different numbers?
If the farm has one number, I wonder what happened when part of the farm was
sold off ... or if two farms merged?
Bonita
If on a large farm several families lived in separate houses each house would get a number. The ultimate goal of numbering was tax collection! Not for the postman!
Does this help?
Regards
Colette
www.llorca.ovh.org