The Smiley Smile Message Board

Besides this discussion forum, I am also interested in family histories. FindAGrave.com is one of my favorite websites for searching for cemetery information on famous people as well as not-so-famous people. I don't know how many of you have checked out that website, or if Brian is interested in his family history, but on that website one can track backwards from Dennis and Carl 7 generations of Wilsons back to Elias Wilson. Not a lot of information is posted on some of the individuals but most have photos of their tombstones and cemetery information. Their are also links to follow siblings, spouses, and other children of the individuals. I find this stuff fascinating and I like to explore cemeteries, although for no ghoulish purposes other than curiosity!

I've researched Brian's ancestry for several years. Got it back - at least one branch - to England in the 11th century: John Chetwode, born 1082. His distant descendant, Green Lee Chitwood (1818-1888) was Brian's great-great grandfather

One ancestor died at the Battle of Flodden in 1513: Thomas Maisterson, born 1465 in Nantwich, Cheshire.

Of Brian's 16 great-grandparents, the breakdown of birthplaces are:

US - 6 (OH 2, TN 2, NY 2)
Sweden - 3
Holland - 2
Germany/Prussia - 2
Norway - 1
Canada - 1
Ireland - 1

This is incredibly interesting! Thanks for the research guys!

Fascinating stuff!

I wrote about Brian's Swedish ancestors here: http://smileysmile.net/board/index.php/topic,3775.msg350524.html#msg350524

Jeepers Creepers!!! :o  Andrew...When you have some down time...can you check on MY family history?  Thanks.  Appreciate it.  That's really, REALLY good of you. :)

 Ya...WW...I checked out a cemetary on my way to this new residence of mine...back in June of 2014  Stopped in to see 2 cousins I hadn't seen in maybe 55 years and went to see some GREAT Aunts who I knew from when I was about 2 until maybe 10ish before they both passed.  They were sisters of my Mom's mother.  She was a Grandmother who passed away before the stork dropped me off.  Poor dear.  She missed out eh?

This is interesting stuff.  Although my cousin Bill who graduated college as an undertaker...moved on instead to the newspaper business after a decade or so of planting folks.  All he seemed to be able to grow was tombstones. >:D

Amazing stuff, Andrew.

If you get some time could you look into Zeppo Wilson's family history. That man is a mystery.

I'm interested in a perfectly irrelevant detail: Why do you write "Germany/Prussia" instead of just one of the names? Where were those two people born and what were their names? (Info for non-historians: Prussia was extended at times far into non-German-language areas.)

No problem: the couple in question are

Carl Friedrich Priegnitz, born 28 December 1827 in Prussia, died 24 January 1906 in Two Rivers, WI, and his wife

Caroline, born circa 1819 in Germany.

They were Brian's great-great grandparents on his mother's - the Korthof - side. And now you know as much as I do - it's not a branch I've lavished that much attention on.

Very interesting. I can see what Micha's driving at; as part of my German language degree, I specialised in German history, but I'm British, so I can sort of see both sides of the story to some extent, ie. how the Germans see history, and also how that same history tends to be viewed from outside Germany.

The Wilson great-great-grandparents in question lived either side of 1871, so I can see how we would say that they lived in 'Germany/Prussia'. The international view of that would be that they lived in Prussia before 1871, and in the German Empire after that (well, OK, if you were being super-finnicky, you might say that they lived in Prussia before 1867, then the North German Confederation until 1871, and then the German Empire after that).

I know that Prussia very much continued to exist after 1871, all the way officially until early 1947 if I remember rightly... but to non-Germans, the view tends to be  that all the Prussians were just part of Germany after the unification in 1871.

That's a little unfair and reductionist, of course, and even today, I know plenty of Bavarians who consider themselves Bavarian first and German second - but internationally, we tend to crassly reduce you all to Germans. Of course, there's a similar thing with Scots and Northern Irish, who, depending on personal and family history, can get a bit riled at being regarded internationally as British first and Scots or Irish second, when they would prefer it the other way around, or the British tag dropped altogether...!

With all questions of national identity, things get a bit complicated. After the crowns of Scotland and England were united in 1606 (but the countries themselves remained separate), the new King James, who ruled both, tried to popularise the idea of 'Great Britain', and apparently tried to spread the usage of 'South Britain' to refer to England and 'North Britain' to refer to Scotland, in a bid to get both countries to see each other as parts of a bigger whole. It failed completely - both the English and the Scots refused to subsume their identities in anything larger, and it took another hundred years before the countries were properly united, and even then for a different set of reasons. And arguably, Scotland has been trying intermittently to get away again ever since...!

So too, as I understand it, in Germany. Advocates of German unification tried to declare support as early as 1848 for the Prussian King's tongue-in-cheek statement in March that year, 'Fortan geht Preußen in Deutschland auf' ('From this day, Prussia is forever merged into Germany')... but of course in fact it continued to exist, both legally and in the hearts and minds of its inhabitants, who continued to feel Prussian first and German second for a long, long time after that. And so too in the minds of the Prussian royal family. King William IV, who made that statement, didn't really mean it when he said it, he was just trying to appease a load of revolutionary advocates of unification. And on the very eve of the REAL unification in 1871, there was a bust-up between Bismarck and the Prussian King, Wilhelm, who refused to be called German Emperor, and instead hoped for the subtly different 'Emperor of the Germans', suggesting that many different kinds of German would continued to exist after the unification, or 'Emperor of Germany'. However, Bismarck, and various other royals, talked him round in the end, and Wilhelm did become German Emperor.

But with regard to Germany from an international perspective, I think it's interesting that every historical atlas I've ever seen shows England and France as a uniform state of one colour throughout the Middle Ages, and shows Germany as a patchwork of smaller states during the same period - and then, after 1871, all of Germany is simply shown as one colour as well. The reality was that the component states very much continued to exist, of course — but it's as though the international community loses interest in them as separate entities after 1871!

Um. OK. Way off topic there. Sorry, Andrew. I'm also interested in the answer to Micha's second question, which can also be framed: although BW's ancestors came from Prussia, were they German Prussians, or something else? As Micha says, Prussia in this period covered vast areas where Poles, Masurians, Kashubians, Curonians and even Lithuanians also lived. I'm interested in that too, as my ancestors on one side were Lithuanians too, who only came to the UK just before World War I.

You can sometimes get a good idea of what language Prussians spoke from what their surname was. Priegnitz, correct me if I'm wrong here Micha, is a name from Mecklenburg, so I'm guessing they were German speaking Prussians, not from one of the linguistic minorities...

OK. Should we talk about Surfing USA now?  ;)

He was born. And died some time after that.

Zeppo died!!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOO!

I'm still alive.
Z

What a stunning post, Matt! When we're on the same side of the channel one day we must take some time for having a talk. :)

You're knowledge is so detailed there is little to add though, just here:


The difference to before isn't that the other countries lost interest in those states, but because from 1871 Germany had a real government with real power over the whole territory, and a country-wide currency was introduced. The states were reduced from independent countries to administrative units. (IIRC correctly, Bavaria kept some embassies in other countries running for some time.) So rightfully there is only one colour from 1871 on, it's like that in our historical atlases too. Before, there was an German emperor up to 1806, but he didn't have any real power over states other than his own.

I take it that if you knew the cities they were born in you had already supplied them? That would be the only interesting thing left to know.

The names point to German speaking people. "Priegnitz" has a Slavian root, but that family may have switched to the German language centuries before those two were born.

If you are are a member of Ancestry. com you are able to view AGDs' impressive family trees relating to the Beach Boys.

Andrew, do you know the cities the Priegnitzes were born in and/or the cities they lived in?

Been researching this for over ten years, on and off: if I knew, it'd be on the tree.

Thank you! :)