In my last post I discussed using Personalbuchs, death records, and university albums to round out our knowledge of the Hirschhausen family. In the process we discovered that Emmy von Lemm, the mother of the family, was born in the German settlement of Katharinenfeld, now Bolnisi, in Georgia. Lacking access to any Lutheran parish registers from Katharinenfeld, have we reached a dead end or can we still learn something about her ancestry?
We can start by recalling what we already know. According to her marriage record she was the daughter of Pastor Diaconus Joseph Lemm, who, we may suppose, was quite probably the husband of the pastor’s wife Marie von Lemm who stood godmother to Emmy’s daughter Bertha (see the previous posts in this series). We can also return to a seemingly unimportant piece of information in the Personalbuch entry for her and her husband’s family:
We can start by recalling what we already know. According to her marriage record she was the daughter of Pastor Diaconus Joseph Lemm, who, we may suppose, was quite probably the husband of the pastor’s wife Marie von Lemm who stood godmother to Emmy’s daughter Bertha (see the previous posts in this series). We can also return to a seemingly unimportant piece of information in the Personalbuch entry for her and her husband’s family:
On the left is the entry for her birth, on the right the entry for her confirmation. She was confirmed in Reval (modern Tallinn) in the spring of 1886, almost six months before she married Richard Hirschhausen in the Ritter- und Domkirche there. It might seem like the smallest of clues, but the gap is telling: not only was she married in Reval, but she was living there at least half a year before. Could her family have migrated from rural Georgia to (or back to?) Reval and might there be evidence of them in Reval records?
A quick search of the Personalbuch for the Ritter- und Domkirche in this period rewards our suspicions:
A quick search of the Personalbuch for the Ritter- und Domkirche in this period rewards our suspicions:
Pastor Diaconus Joseph Lemm, his wife, and children are all present, including Emmy, who turns out to be the eldest. The birthplaces given for her siblings suggest that Joseph and Marie Lemm left Georgia circa 1874x1877 and were in Reval by 1881. But what were they doing in Georgia in the first place? Our first port of call is the Dorpat Album Academicum I discussed previously:
We can supplement this, however, with Lemm’s entry in the Erik Amburger Datenbank, a massive online prosopographical study of foreigners in pre-revolutionary Russia (fortunately for our purposes, Baltic-Germans outside of the Baltic provinces fall within the EAD’s remit). Lemm, it turns out, is very well documented. Not only are we presented with a list of printed materials which mention him, we also learn – in addition to the biography provided by the Album Academicum – that he was educated at the exclusive St. Petrischule in St. Petersburg from 1852 to 1858. From there he studied theology in Dorpat before taking up his post as a Lutheran minister . . . in Katharinenfeld.
From there, it’s the work of a moment to turn to the birth registers for Hapsal in search of Joseph Lemm’s birth record, but what should be a routine search proves to be unexpectedly problematic: the Hapsal birth registers were searched from June 1840 through the end of 1841 but no Joseph Lemm is to be found. What to do? One possible avenue of research would be to examine the revision lists for Hapsal during this period, but unfortunately no family of Lemms can be discovered (revision lists and their uses will be returned to in a future post). Another possibility, however, lies in the very name of the family: Lemm or von Lemm? Use of the nobiliary particle in Baltic-German culture could mean several things. It might mean membership in the Ritterschaft of one of the Baltic territories, the aristocratic governing castes who exerted decisive political power in the Baltic from the middle ages to 1918. But it also might mean that the family in question had been granted nobility by a foreign power but had never been matriculated into a Ritterschaft, been ennobled in Russia as service nobility, or were not noble at all, but were instead members of the urban mercantile patriciates in Reval, Riga, and elsewhere. A number of published resources of varying levels of detail and reliability cover these various classes of nobility.
The first ports of call when investigating a Baltic-German noble family are the eight volumes of the Genealogisches Handbuch der Baltischen Ritterschaft, divided into subdivisions covering Estland, Livland, Kurland, and Ösel:
From there, it’s the work of a moment to turn to the birth registers for Hapsal in search of Joseph Lemm’s birth record, but what should be a routine search proves to be unexpectedly problematic: the Hapsal birth registers were searched from June 1840 through the end of 1841 but no Joseph Lemm is to be found. What to do? One possible avenue of research would be to examine the revision lists for Hapsal during this period, but unfortunately no family of Lemms can be discovered (revision lists and their uses will be returned to in a future post). Another possibility, however, lies in the very name of the family: Lemm or von Lemm? Use of the nobiliary particle in Baltic-German culture could mean several things. It might mean membership in the Ritterschaft of one of the Baltic territories, the aristocratic governing castes who exerted decisive political power in the Baltic from the middle ages to 1918. But it also might mean that the family in question had been granted nobility by a foreign power but had never been matriculated into a Ritterschaft, been ennobled in Russia as service nobility, or were not noble at all, but were instead members of the urban mercantile patriciates in Reval, Riga, and elsewhere. A number of published resources of varying levels of detail and reliability cover these various classes of nobility.
The first ports of call when investigating a Baltic-German noble family are the eight volumes of the Genealogisches Handbuch der Baltischen Ritterschaft, divided into subdivisions covering Estland, Livland, Kurland, and Ösel:
Of these, only the sections for Estland and Ösel were completed; work on further volumes covering Livland and Kurland was interrupted by the second world war. Unfortunately, this means that the Livland and Kurland volumes lack indexes and can be navigated only by tables of contents. Finding no indication of a von Lemm family in either, we then turn to the indexes in the volumes covering Estland and Ösel. In the latter we find, not an article on the von Lemms themselves, but two scattered notices, including one relating directly to the family under consideration:
This seems to suggest that the von Lemms were never matriculated in any of the Ritterschafts (unless, of course, they were resident in Livland or Kurland and were amongst the families not covered by the existing volumes). So we turn to the relevant volume of the ‘Neuer Siebmacher’, a vast roll of armigerous families in the German lands published between 1854 and 1967. There – under “Nichtimmatrikulirte Adel” – we find . . . absolutely nothing:
Gritzner, however, tends to ignore Russian nobility in the Baltic-German provinces, so it may be that the von Lemms were ennobled by the Russian state in the relatively recent past. This probably means there will be no published pedigree of the family and we’ll have to make contact with a researcher in St. Petersburg to investigate the relevant archival material. However, on the off-chance, we check Alfred von Hansen’s Stammtafeln nicht immatrikulierter baltischer Adelsgeschlechter, 1 vol. in 8 parts (Reval, 1932-1939). Remarkably, we are rewarded and we suddenly find ourselves presented, not only with Joseph von Lemm’s parents, but with a complete pedigree of the family:
To find that von Hansen covered the family one’s looking for is a piece of good luck and an unusual one at that, but it highlights the value of published noble genealogies. Often reliant upon family archives and church books which have since vanished in the upheavals of the twentieth century, they can be invaluable for bridging links like this one and providing an extensive pedigree upon which to base further research. Their weakness, of course, is their limited coverage: most families were not noble and for them other sources will have to be used, especially before the standardisation of vital records in 1834. In my next post I’ll discuss how we can make use of revision lists and pre-1834 parish registers to reconstruct a non-noble Baltic-German family living in rural Estonia (city dwellers present their own special problems and will be discussed in a later post).
Have these essays been useful to you? Did they help you study a Baltic-German family? If so do get in touch -- I’d love to hear about it.
Copyright © 2013 Kelsey Jackson Williams
Have these essays been useful to you? Did they help you study a Baltic-German family? If so do get in touch -- I’d love to hear about it.
Copyright © 2013 Kelsey Jackson Williams