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:

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:

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:

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

We tend to think – and with reason – that higher education in the pre-modern world was the domain of the elite.  This is true, but it doesn’t tell the entire story.  A substantial number of students in British universities from before the Reformation until comparatively recently were being educated for careers, not lives of leisure, and an examination of university records can often reveal a surprising amount of information about both upwardly- and downwardly mobile individuals. 

In Scotland, which had a phenomenally high literacy rate of 75% as early as 1750, not to mention twice as many universities as its neighbour to the south, university records are a particularly important resource for tracing any family from tacksmen to peers.  Unfortunately, researchers used to the biographically rich dictionaries of English graduates, the Alumni Oxonienses and Cantabrigienses, will be disappointed.  Some works, such as Anderson’s Fasti of Marischal College or Addison’s Glasgow matriculation albums, contain more or less the level of information found in the English Alumni, but most others are bare lists of names, reflecting the sparer record-keeping practices of many of the Scottish universities; sometimes it was simply impossible for the scholars who compiled these materials to identify which 'James Baillie' or 'Robert Young' a particular entry referred to.

Why bother with such records, then, if identification of individual university graduates is so uncertain?  Perhaps the best reason is the idiosyncratic Scottish use of “Mr” in early modern documents.  Whereas English usage of the period was simply honorific (“Mr” in the seventeenth century and before was an abbreviation for “master” and vaguely implied superior social status but little more), in Scotland the title was reserved for literal masters, men who had graduated M.A. (magister artium) from a university.  If you’re investigating such a person, locating their university record can help pinpoint their date of birth, indicate possible links of association and patronage, and perhaps even provide a clue as to their place of origin.

But how to start?  To indicate some first ports of call and to give a sense of what material is available in print, I’ve compiled a comprehensive bibliography of published university matriculation albums, graduation rolls, fasti, and similar documents, indicating where digital versions exist (similar to the catalogue of burgess rolls I compiled recently).  I’ve also included brief comments on the information they contain and examples of what you can expect to find.

Aberdeen

Peter John Anderson, ed.  Fasti Academiae Mariscallanae Aberdonensis: Selections from the Records of Marischal College and University, MDXCIII-MDCCCLX, 3 vols.  Aberdeen: Printed for the New Spalding Club, 1889-1898.  Vol. 1.  Vol. 2.  Vol. 3.

Anderson’s Fasti are some of the best examples of their kind.  A typical example of the material given on late eighteenth-century undergraduates is this, taken from page 377:

Peter John Anderson, ed.  Officers and Graduates of University & King’s College, Aberdeen, MVD-MDCCCLX.  Aberdeen: Printed for the New Spalding Club, 1893.

By contrast, Anderson’s volume for King’s is sparser in the information it provides – in large part due to the different record-keeping systems of the two universities.  Note in this example (from page 251) that while most of the students are identified only by county of origin, James Trail is specifically stated to be the son of the minister of Dunnet in Caithness:

Edinburgh

A Catalogue of the Graduates in the Faculties of Arts, Divinity, and Law, of the University of Edinburgh, Since its Foundation.  Edinburgh: The Bannatyne Club, 1858.

None of the Edinburgh registers are particularly informative, although the Catalogue does consistently indicate whether a particular graduate was training for the ministry, data which can potentially be of considerable use in identifying them further:

Alphabetical List of Graduates of the University of Edinburgh from 1859 to 1888.  Edinburgh: by James Thin, 1889.

A bare list of names, with very occasional notes as to subsequent profession:

List of the Graduates in Medicine in the University of Edinburgh, from MDCCV to MDCCCLXVI.  Edinburgh: Printed by Neill & Company, 1867.

Students are identified by their country of origin (distinctions being made between English, Scotland, and Ireland) and by the title of their thesis:

Glasgow

W. Innes Addison, ed.  Matriculation Albums of the University of Glasgow from 1728 to 1858.  Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1913.

Addison’s is probably the genealogically richest – not to mention the most entertaining – of any of the university registers, a fairly characteristic example being:

W. Innes Addison, ed.  A Roll of the Graduates of the University of Glasgow from 31st December, 1727 to 31st December, 1897.  Glasgow: James Maclehose & Sons, 1898.

While less extensive than Addison’s Matriculation Albums, his Roll of the Graduates still frequently gives later places of residence, occupations, and (occasionally) parentage:

Munimenta Alme Universitatis Glasguensis: Records of the University of Glasgow, from its Foundations till 1727, 4 vols.  Glasgow: The Maitland Club, 1854.  Vol. 1.  Vol. 2.  Vol. 3.  Vol. 4.

The third volume includes a list of graduates from 1578 to 1695 and 1707 to 1727, a list of matriculations from 1590 to 1696, and various other identifying lists of university members.  Information beyond a name and sometimes a nationality is usually non-existent (although note the future antiquary, politician, and composer John Clerk of Pennycuik at the bottom of the page):

University of Glasgow: Graduates to 1913.  

An online database maintained by the university which contains most or all of the information given in the above printed sources.


St. Andrews

James Maitland Anderson, ed.  Early Records of the University of St Andrews: The Graduation Roll, 1413-1579.  Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1926.

James Maitland Anderson, ed.  The Matriculation Roll of the University of St Andrews, 1747-1897.  Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1905.

Earlier entries are merely names, but from the mid-nineteenth century onwards places of residence are also given (Smart’s Biographical Register remains the better genealogical resource, however):

R. N. Smart, ed.  Alphabetical Register of the Students, Graduates and Officials of the University of St Andrews, 1579-1747.  St. Andrews: University of St. Andrews Library, 2012.

R. N. Smart, ed.  Biographical Register of the University of St. Andrews, 1747-1897.  St. Andrews: University of St. Andrews Library, 2004.

An exemplary piece of biographical detective-work, with rich, complete biographies of most students from the period covered.

Thanks to Janet Wolfe for pointing out the online database of Glasgow graduates.

Copyright © 2013 Kelsey Jackson Williams

In the first article in this series we identified the marriage and birth records of Bertha Marie Madeleine Hirschhausen.  This, in turn, led us to her parents, although we don’t yet know much about them.  In this article I’ll discuss how we might use further records of varying types to flesh out our knowledge of this couple.  In particular, I’ll look at Personalbuchs, death records, and a useful biographical dictionary.

The single most important source for late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Baltic-German genealogy is the Personalbuch, a listing of members of an individual parish congregation which at its best gives the names of a couple, their dates and places of birth, marriage, and death, and the names and births of their children.  Not only does this single record type offer a wealth of information for which there’s simply no comparison in most other countries, it’s one of the few types of document for which substantial digital indexes already exist.  A quick search of the “Personal name indexes of registers of parishioners” at Saaga reveals a Hirschhausen entry in the Personalbuch for Roicks between 1895 and 1929.  We know that Bertha married in Roicks and an examination of the Personalbuch itself confirms that this is the right family:

We now know much more than we did before.  Bertha had four siblings and we can see from the far righthand column that at least some of them moved to Palamuse (German St. Bartholomäi) near Tartu in 1922.  Palamuse is distant both from Roicks and from the family’s previous residence in Wesenberg, so it may be that they moved to be near family after the deaths of their parents.  We’ve also learnt more about the parents themselves: their birth dates and places, their marriage date, and their death dates (even if all of this is a bit hard to read since their names have been scored out – probably to indicate that they had died).

Closer examination also reveals something unexpected about Bertha’s mother, Emilie Wilhelmine von Lemm:

She was born in “Katharinenfeld[,] Kaukasus”, a town now known as Bolnisi in Georgia which had been founded by German colonists in the early nineteenth century (most of the descendants of those colonists were later deported during World War II, but some of their homes can still be seen.  On the face of it, this might suggest that the von Lemm line will be a dead-end; using Estonian archives is one thing, making sense of what’s left of Georgian archives is quite another.  However, we will see.  It’s slightly odd that someone from a German farming colony in the far south of the Empire should first end up Reval (where she was confirmed in 1886) and then marry a Baltic-German clergyman, so the full story may turn out to be a bit more complicated.

The Personalbuch has now given us all the data we need to perform a sweep of relevant (but unindexed) vital records for Bertha’s parents.  Let’s start with their deaths.  Although no place of death is indicated for either, they probably occurred in Roicks.  Sure enough we first find Pastor Hirschhausen:

And then his wife:

As you can see, death records give dates of death and burial, name and occupation, place of birth, age at death, marital status, and cause of death – a rich mine of data (even if, in these cases, we already knew most of it from the Personalbuch).

The Personalbuch indicates that Richard and Emmy were married in the Ritter- und Domkirche in Reval (Estonian Tallinn), the ecclesiastical centre of the Baltic-German world.  This might mean that they were from prominent families – many leading noblemen and civil servants were married there – or simply that they happened to be residing within the parish boundaries.  Their marriage is easy to find (it was a small parish):

Now we know the names of Richard and Emmy’s parents and a pattern is beginning to emerge.  Richard’s father was August Hirschhausen, Pastor of St. Matthäi, and Emmy’s was Pastor-Diaconus Joseph Lemm.  It would appear that both were from career ecclesiastical families (a tightly-knit social group of their own within Baltic-German society).

We could now proceed directly to working on Pastors Hirschhausen Senior and Lemm, but first I’d like to at least try to flesh out what we know about Richard and Emmy.  Working up genealogical data into an interesting biography is never easy, but in Richard’s case we’re helped by his occupation.  Nearly every Lutheran pastor in the Baltic-German lands was educated at the University of Dorpat (Tartu Ülikool).  The Dorpat Album Academicum for this period has been published, so it’s only the work of a moment to look for Richard:

It’s not much, but it tells us that he studied theology at Dorpat, 1877-1884, and spent a year as a parochial vicar (training for the pastorate), 1884-1885, before being appointed adjunct pastor in Wesenberg.  This is a fairly typical career progression for a Baltic-German clergyman, but interesting nonetheless.  One can perhaps get a sense of what this entailed from modern pictures of the churches he would have worked in at Wesenberg and Roicks.

We could keep working on this family – maybe tracing Bertha’s siblings forward to Palamuse, for example – but what we’ve found already serves to gives us a pretty good picture:

It’s possible, as you can see, to discover a remarkable amount of information about Baltic-Germans in the latter part of the nineteenth century.  In the next articles in this series, I’ll explain how we might trace the ancestry of Emmy von Lemm.  What do you when someone is born beyond – as one might say – the archives we know?


[1] Roicks, Personalbuch VIII, 1895-1929, EAA.3170.1.200, fol. 56v; Roicks, Deaths, 1892-1929, EAA.3170.1.198, fols. 100v-101r.

[2] A. Hasselblatt and G. Otto, Album Academicum der Kaiserlichen Universität Dorpat (Dorpat, 1889), 737.

[3] Ritter- und Domkirche, Reval, Banns and Marriages, 1864-1891, TLA.237.2.7, unpaginated [digitised image 69].

[4] Roicks, Personalbuch VIII, 1895-1929, EAA.3170.1.200, fol. 56v.

[5] Roicks, Deaths, 1892-1929, EAA.3170.1.198, fols. 106v-107r.

[6] Wesenberg, Births (town church), 1879-1891, EAA.3057.1.21, fols. 100v-101r.

[7] Wesenberg, Births (town church), 1879-1891, EAA.3057.1.21, fols. 100v-101r.

[8] Roicks, Banns and Marriages, 1892-1929, EAA.3170.1.197, not paginated [digitised image 74].

[9] Roicks, Personalbuch VIII, 1895-1929, EAA.3170.1.200, fol. 56v.

[10] Roicks, Personalbuch VIII, 1895-1929, EAA.3170.1.200, fol. 56v.

[11] Roicks, Personalbuch VIII, 1895-1929, EAA.3170.1.200, fol. 56v.

[12] Roicks, Personalbuch VIII, 1895-1929, EAA.3170.1.200, fol. 56v.


Copyright © 2013 Kelsey Jackson Williams

The Friends of the Dundee City Archives have published online abstracts of entries in Dundee's 'Lockit Book'.  So called because it was literally protected with two locks, the manuscript is a register of those admitted burgesses of the city and dates back to the sixteenth century.  Municipal records such as this one are often central to establishing genealogies of non-noble urban families in the early modern period as new burgesses tended to be admitted to the privilege by right of their relationship to earlier burgesses, usually a father or father-in-law. 

Many equivalent registers of burgesses and guild-brethren for Edinburgh, Glasgow, and elsewhere have been published and a number of the older volumes are now available online (see below).  Still more remain in manuscript and are an important but under-used resource.  Some of these are more or less where you would expect.  For example, Stirling's book of Burgess Entries for 1659 to 1936 is in the burgh archives (Stirling Council Archives, GB224/SB1).  Others, however, are tucked away in some quite obscure locations -- the Canongate burgess book for 1790 to c.1856 is currently reposing in the archive of Fraser, Stoddart, and Ballingall, Writers to the Signet (NRS, GB234/GD232).  How it came to be there is anyone's guess.  As more of these invaluable manuscripts are recovered, analysed, and put to use we can expect our understanding of late medieval and early modern urban families to change dramatically.

Published Burgess Registers

Aberdeen

Register of Burgesses of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1399-1700, 2 vols., ed. Alexander Macdonald Munro.  Aberdeen: New Spalding Club, 1890-1906.

Register of Merchant and Trade Burgesses of Aberdeen, 1600-1700, 5 vols., ed. Frances McDonnell.  St. Andrews: F. McDonnell, 1994.

Register of Merchant and Trade Burgesses of Old Aberdeen, 1605-1715, ed. Frances McDonnell.  St. Andrews: F. McDonnell, 1994.

Register of Merchant and Trade Burgesses of Old Aberdeen, 1726-1885, ed. Frances McDonnell.  St. Andrews: F. McDonnell, 1994.

Roll of Guild Burgesses of the Royal Burgh of Aberdeen, 1399-1631.  Aberdeen: s.n., 1890.

Ayr

Burgesses and Guild Brethren of Ayr, 1647-1846, ed. Alistair Lindsay and Jean B. Kennedy.  Drongan: Ayrshire Federation of Historical Societies, 2002.

Banff

Burgess Roll of Banff, 1549-1892, ed. Frances McDonnell.  St. Andrews: F. McDonnell, 1994.

Canongate, Edinburgh

Register of the Burgesses of the Burgh of the Canongate from 27th June 1622 to 25th September 1733, ed. Helen Armet.  Edinburgh: Scottish Record Society, 1951.

Dumbarton

Roll of Dumbarton Burgesses and Guild-Brethren, 1600-1846 . . ., ed. F. Roberts.  Edinburgh: Scottish Record Society, 1937.

Edinburgh

Roll of Edinburgh Burgesses and Guild-Brethren, 1406-1700, ed. Charles B. Boog Watson.  Edinburgh: Scottish Record Society, 1929.

Roll of Edinburgh Burgesses and Guild-Brethren, 1701-1760, ed. Charles B. Boog Watson.  Edinburgh: Scottish Record Society, 1930.

Roll of Edinburgh Burgesses and Guild-Brethren, 1761-1841.  Part I.--Abercrombie--Huie, ed. Charles B. Boog Watson.  Edinburgh: Scottish Record Society, 1933.  

Elgin

Burgess Roll of Elgin, ed. Frances McDonnell.  St. Andrews: F. McDonnell, 1994.

Glasgow

The Burgesses and Guild Brethren of Glasgow, 1573-1750, ed. James R. Anderson.  Edinburgh: Scottish Record Society, 1925.

The Burgesses and Guild Brethren of Glasgow, 1751-1846, ed. James R. Anderson.  Edinburgh: Scottish Record Society, 1935.

Inveraray

The Burgesses of Inveraray, 1665-1963, ed. E. Beaton and S. W. MacIntyre.  Edinburgh: Scottish Record Society, 1990.

Kirkcudbright

Kirkcudbright Burgesses 1576 to 1975, ed. D. Richard Torrance.  Edinburgh: D. R. Torrance, 1997.

Perth

Burgesses of Perth, 1600-1699, ed. David Dobson.  St. Andrews: David Dobson, 2002.

St. Andrews

Burgess Rolls of Fife, 1700-1800, and St. Andrews, 1700-1775, ed. David Dobson.  Westminster, Maryland: Willow Bend Books, 2000.

Burgess Roll of St. Andrews, 1700-1750, ed. David Dobson.  s.l.: D. Dobson, 1994.

Stirling

Stirling Burgesses, 1600-1902, 3 vols.  Available from the Scottish Genealogical Society.


Thanks to Alex Maxwell Findlater and Marlene Tulip for suggesting additions to this handlist.


Copyright © 2013 Kelsey Jackson Williams