I am incredibly lucky that my cousin, Wolf Lackschewitz, compiled a detailed genealogy of my father’s family – the Fircks. Unfortunately for me, the collection he wrote is in German. Slowly I have begun to translate it. For this post, I thought I would go back to nearly the beginning,
I love family trees. One can gather so much information from them if they have been done correctly. And if there are blanks, that just means there is so much more to research and discover – so many opportunities to disappear down multitudes of rabbit holes. Bliss! “Like a tree,
„Gone, gone, the damage done“ are lyrics from a Neil Young song and, while the song is about drug addicts, the words could also describe the feeling my father, and I’m sure other Baltic Germans, felt when their properties were confiscated. I wrote about their estate, Nurmhusen, here and described
This is a picture of my paternal grandmother. She married my grandfather on 20 November 1912. She was 31, my grandfather was 36. By early twentieth century standards, and for a first marriage, they were older than the norm. My grandparents had at least five children between 1913 and 1919.