Sunday, January 16, 2005

Global Village

I'm posting a link for a website about Schloss Wartin, a Pomeranian manor house originally built three centuries ago in the days of Frederick the Great. I mention it because it's quite close to several villages in the Uckermark that I'm told have church records listing the Lubach surname as among their inhabitants as far back as that period. I doubt that any of my ancestors spent much time at the schloss, except perhaps to deliver goods or provide services to the eminences whose occasional presence graced their community. Since reunification the manor has been leased for restoration purposes and community outreach enterprises, among them serving as a WiFi hotspot compliments of Hewlett Packard. Two other short essays about the Schloss are linked at the top of the page, detailing East German Stasi and Nazi Luftwaffe activities at Schloss Wartin in bygone eras.

A nice map of the vicinity can be found on the German version of the site. If you read German you can probably find pictures of the garden, the library and the guard dog. The lower portion of the map shows the area where my ancestors were last seen in East Brandenburg in 1856, a few kilometres south of Chojna (Koenigsburg) and a little north of where it says Moryn (Mohrin). My theory is that they lived in one of several villages near Wartin, but were sent south and east across the Oder River after the 1848 Revolution. Quite a few villages had manor houses at one time, but not many were still standing after the Red Army came through.


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