Brümmer family from Menslage Church books

Date: [unknown] [unknown]
Location: Menslage, Fürstenau, Osnabrück, Heiliges Römisches Reich
Surname/tag: Brümmer, Brummer, Brunner

Contents 1 Where was Menslage? 2 Marienkirche, Menslage, Osnabrück 3 Church books 4 Census of 1772 in Amt Fürstenau 5 Extracted notes on Menslage Brümmer family

Where was Menslage?

What to put into the location field? It is complicated, see Menslage, Niedersachsen category, history of political geography. Before 1802, it was "Menslage, Fürstenau, Osnabrück, Heiliges Römisches Reich" .

Marienkirche, Menslage, Osnabrück

The Evangelisch Lutheran church in Menslage, the Marienkirche kept records of baptisms, marriages, and burials. These have been transcribed, starting from approximately 1694, and made available in three PDFs, online.

They form a genealogical goldmine, from which the Brümmer family was extracted, the origin of my ancestor Johan Wichard, who emigrated to South Africa.

Church books

The PDF's with transcribed church books from Menslage can be found at www.vortmes.nl from the people who did the transcription (not perfect, but this is difficult). The files are also listed at ahnen-forscher.com. The three main sources for Menslage Kirchspiel are:

• Baptisms: Taufregister Kirchspiel Menslage 1694-1912
• Marriages: Trauregister Kirchspiel Menslage 1694-1899
• Deaths: Sterberegister Kirchspiel Menslage 1694-1899

One quibble I have with these pdf files is that they contain something that makes them not perfectly searchable. I partially cleaned this up for myself by using the services of smallpdf.com to unlock/cleanup the pdf file.

Note that much more information is available for the surrounding towns, but it turns out that the Community meeting at the Lutheran Marienkirche of Menslage was rather stable, with not too many people entering or leaving. The information is not perfect, and the various church people recording family details changed how they did things, and even the spelling of names was not fixed.

Census of 1772 in Amt Fürstenau

The results of a census can be found at Census of 1772 of Hochstift Osnabrück, Amt Fürstenau. This gives a little information about who lived where, and especially who were the important family men, owning houses and farms. The Brümmer family seems to have concentrated at the hamlet of Andorf, near to Menslage.

Extracted notes on Menslage Brümmer family

While working through the church records to search my ancestors, I convinced myself that I could only understand the family if I extracted everything about the Brümmer family in the various spelling versions, including rather strange shortening to 'Brmmer'. I was also interested in female ancestors. Interestingly, the earliest Brümmer was a woman, Petronella, whose husband took her surname when they married, because she was 'Colona': she inherited the farm. I've uploaded my extracted notes here in PDF form, as they are more compact and easier to search through than the large church PDFs.