Kreis Einbeck: Help understanding records for villages (Iber, Lüthorst)

[hvogt]

Hello! I hope a question in English is okay.

I am researching ancestors from the Düe, Diekmann and Ebbecke families who are either from Iber or Luthorst (both in the old Einbeck kreis). This is from the years 1820-1890.

I have found English transcriptions of some records online and have some documentation from those who emigrated to the United States. However, I am not sure I am reading the "district" "village" and "parish" labels correctly, and I don't know what labels were used in German.

The issue: The transcribed baptismal and marriage records for many people in the Düe family in particular list the "city or district" as Iber and the "parish" as Lüethorst. I had assumed this meant they were from the village of Iber and the church name is Luethorst.

However, many of the U.S. records from those who came over to the United States say that they are simply from "Luthorst" and some of the German records I have found list the "parish" as Luthorst. The villages of Iber and Luthorst are 22 kilometers apart, so it seems unlikely that members of this family would be going back and forth constantly (especially since there are multiple villages in between).

I am guessing that back in that time "Iber" referred to a larger district that included the village of Luthorst, which is where they were actually from. But when I look at the Meyers Gazeteer both Luthorst and Iber are listed as villages in the Einbeck district.

Can anyone help me out with figuring out which is the actual ancestral village? Of course it's possible that I have incorrectly identified family members or that there really was a lot of movement between these villages, but I have lots of evidence that these people are all from one family and without knowing the records better it's hard to decide!

Thanks! Heidi

Here are a few examples of the types of records I'm talking about:

- A record with village of Iber and Evangelical church of Iber on FamilySearch: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QPDS-HD8T

SOURCE: Deutschland, ausgewählte evangelische Kirchenbücher 1500-1971

Child: Johanna Karoline Christine Wilhelmine Düe

Female

6 May 1859

Father: Karl Düe

Male

Mother: Christiane

Mother maiden name: Diekmann

Female

Baptism

5 Jun 1859

Event place: Iber, Iber, Einbeck, Provinz Hannover, Preußen, Deutsches Reich

51;24

Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv, Standort Hannover

Church Name: Evangelische Kirche Iber (Kr. Einbeck)

Taufen, Heiraten u. Tote 1853-1874

- And here's a record of someone who appears to be the same Karl Due in a record collection on Ancestry, (information pasted below). This one still says "Evangelical church Iber" but it says the parish is "Luethorst": https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui...id=25565141109

SOURCE: Hannover, Germany, Lutheran Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials, 1643-1887

Karl Düe

männlich (Male)

Spouse: Christiane Düe

Child: Karl Georg Friedrich Düe

Author: Evangelische Kirche Iber (Kr. Einbeck)

City or district: Iber

Parish as it appears: Lüethorst

16;29

[Gastonian]

Hello Heidi:

The basic problem here is that you are relying on familysearch and Ancestry transcriptions. Familysearch is notorious for getting locations wrong - in particular, if church books from multiple parishes are on the same film, they locate all records to whatever happens to be the first parish on the film rather than to the proper parish. And in this particular case, the church duplicate records from both the parish of Iber and the parish of Lüthorst are on the same film (Film 1727537), so therefore the confusion.

[Note on "church duplicate": in the 19th century, parishes were required to produce two copies of all records, one to be kept in the parish office and a duplicate to be delivered annually to the state government for safekeeping in case the parish office burned down, which sometimes happened. The Mormons filmed these duplicates in the State Archive of Hannover; the original versions have been filmed by the Church Archive of Hannover (Landeskirchenarchiv Hannover)].

My guess would be that all of your ancestral family members are from the parish of Lüthorst, and that the mention of Iber is simply due to familysearch's error. However, to be sure on this, the solution is not to rely on the transcriptions, but instead to look at the actual churchbooks (which, though, will require an ability to read not just German, but also the old script). These church duplicates unfortunately cannot be viewed on either familysearch.org or ancestry.com (and the originals are also not yet available on the Protestant Church of Germany's paysite archion.de), but you can view them by going to a Family History Center. When you locate the record, page back to the beginning of that particular churchbook to see what is written as the parish's name on the title page (the church duplicates are usually organized by year, with a title for each year, so you shouldn't have to page back very far).

Regards

--Carl-Henry

[Gastonian]

To add:

The parishes of Iber and Lüthorst, each centered on the village of that name, are two separate and equal parishes; one is not subordinate to the other.

Neither familysearch nor Ancestry transcribe the subordinate villages that sometimes appear in the churchbooks. The "city" field is intended for larger cities like Berlin that have multiple parishes within them. I would thus disregard "Iber" as being a city or district - it was neither.

For more on the two villages, see the German Wikipedia entries at https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iber_(Einbeck) and https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%BCthorst, with pictures of the respective churches in each of them. If you cannot read German, you can run the text through Google Translate.

In my experience, Ancestry has made at least an effort to double-check the records it got from familysearch for the proper parish. I would thus interpret the Ancestry transcription as saying that it is in Iber according to familysearch, but the actual parish as shown in the churchbook is Lüthorst (and we know that familysearch is likely wrong in assigning it to Iber).

Regards

--Carl-Henry

[hvogt]

Thanks so much! This is finally helping me make sense of what I thought were conflicting records. It sounds like Lüthorst is indeed the actual original place. I'd been so puzzled trying to understand how things like records of people who appeared to be born in Iber, married in Luthorst, died in Iber, etc. I have an obituary from one family member that mentions Lüthorst, so that makes me more confident that they're probably all from there.


Sounds like I'll have to make a trip to a FamilySearch center to confirm for sure, but now it is all finally making sense!

[wfn]

Hallo, diesen Geburtseintrag 1859 gibt es im KB Iber nicht. VG wfn

[hvogt]

Oh that must mean that Iber is incorrect and it definitely is Luthorst! Thanks so much!