My cousin Sandy Semmens née Schaedel has been working on some documents about the history of
our common family in what is now Germany: the Lohmanns (the paternal side of our grandmother's family) and and the Rieplings (the maternal side). They're
currently in draft stage, and I've been working my way through them.
Two questions: first, Sandy doesn't speak German, and doesn't understand that Munder and Münder are two different words. Secondly,
the document refers to places that are now in Germany. But what was the country when they
were born? Sandy prefers to use an approximation to modern addresses, giving rise to
addresses like Kessiehausen, Bakede, Bad Munder, Hameln-Pyrmont, Lower Saxony, Germany (one
place). But she leaves Königsberg as Konigsberg, Germany rather than Kaliningrad, Russia.
My suggestion is to use the addresses and nationalities as they were at the time, and add a
section somewhere describing where they are nowadays, something like
Kessiehausen and Bakede are now parts of Bad Münder. Since 1949 they are in the
Hameln-Pyrmont district of Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen) in Germany. Adenstedt is now a
part of Ilsede in the Peine district of Lower Saxony.
But no, she wasn't looking for criticism, only content. It's her document, and it
will stay that way, misspellings and all. Schadel.
My last batch of Laugenstangen is
finished, time for more. I made a real mess of rolling up the dough last time, so I asked
Yvonne to do it for me this time:
Stupidly again, that wasn't what the recipe stated. I should have let them rise for 20
minutes first. But I left them for 20 minutes after dunking them, and the results were much
better than the first time. Here last time and today:
Make from Mike Jeays today. He
can't read my diary. He gets error 500: internal server error, and it only affects the
page .
OK, check. I don't get a server error message, but I don't get a display of the page
anyway. And yet it's exactly the same as the local copy, which displays normally.
After some searching, came up with:
[Sat Apr 26 01:41:15.333015 2025] [php7:emerg] [pid 73885] [client 121.200.11.253:22896] PHP Parse error: Invalid indentation - tabs and spaces cannot be mixed in /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/diary.php on line 590
Huh? The page content stopped at line 298 with a <?php exit (); ?>. But I keep notes
about the following days after the exit, and somehow they have grown over the years; the
total length of the file was over 1000 lines. The trouble is that I need to check each
individual note and decide whether I can remove it or whether I should act on it. Time to
move older entries to a separate file. But on reflection, it seems reasonable that the
parser should continue. And it seems that something, probably a misguided Emacs, had indented a lot of these
notes. That's irritating in itself, and worth restoring the entry of two days ago.
But why does PHP refuse the
combination of tabs and spaces? They occur all the time in other languages, and even in my
PHP source. It must only be an issue in a specific context. What's it really complaining
about?
Where was Conrad (Konrad) Friedrich Christian Lohmann, my -great- grandfather born? Sandy's
draft history says
that he was born on 7 Dec 1857 in
“Kessiehausen, Bakede, Hameln-Pyrmont, Lower Saxony Germany”.
That's inaccurate, of course. The KreisHameln-Pyrmont, the LandNiedersachsen (Lower Saxony) and the
country Germany all first came
into existence in 1949. And Bakede is just an Ortsteil (“suburb”) of Bad Münder, so
the probable address would be Kessiehausen, Bad Münder.
But what was the “country”? For my great-grandfather I thought that it would be clear: the
German Confederation. Oh. But until 1949 (after Yvonne's birth) nationality
was a matter of the Land, not the country. Yvonne was born a citizen of Thüringen, not any higher-order state.
So where was Conrad born? My guess is in Hannover, but maybe an outpost of
Hessen-Kassel.
That wasn't even what I was looking for. The family appears to have lived in Kessiehausen
for at least 50 years prior to that. What was that? As it happens, Kessiehausen is still
on the map. Google Maps shows:
Somehow that reminds me both of Schellnhausen, where we lived from 1991 to 1997, and Ködderitzsch, the ancestral home of
Yvonne's family, though Ködderitzsch is considerably larger. Even an address that I saw on
the maps rings a bell: „Kessiehausen 2“, just the name of the settlement and a house number.
We had „Schellnhausen 2“.
Where was it when Conrad's grandparents married in Badeke in 1809? The far-too-small map on
page 111 of my „Kleiner Atlas zur deutschen Territorialgeschichte“ shows that Münder was on
the edge of several states, including Hannover, maybe Braunschweig, Lippe-Detmold or Kurhessen. How can I ever find out? This map, from Wikipedia, eliminates Lippe-Detmold:
Bad Münder is not marked, but it's at the very north-east, well into Hannover territory.
But it was dated 1918. Had the borders been stable for over 100 years?
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
a day or two after I write it.
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a
“blog”, and there is
deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle
for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to
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