As if I couldn't get any geekier! Here we go on another wild ride through the mind and the past. I've been back on this genealogical train since I figured out how to widen some of my search parameters. And boy have I found a lot!
The problem is that I am looking for the origins of the family names, which requires looking so far back in time that a person can get lost while, at the same time, trying to go backwards from Grampa to find the family. And I am looking at the most unstable region of European history. That was something that I didn't remember from study as a kid. But it turns out that not only were German borders extremely fluid, but the ruling Landgraf/Margrave/Herr of a region frequently did not call his homelands by the same name as the Koenig(king) or the historians. And more than one region can share names. I don't know why this surprises me. Every town in America it seems has a "Front" street or a "Union" street. So why would an unstable region like Germany not have more than one "Lauenstein" and multiple spellings thereof? I don't know. Because I thought they were the most logical of all the Europeans?
they aren't. And their stubbornness is of a particular kind. It isn't the generic stubbornness and obstinacy that makes a person say "no" when they know they are expected to say "yes". It's the kind that embodies Fleetwood Mac's plea to go your own way. And there we have another problem in research... Thuringia.
Is it a province? Is it a very large estate of a duke? Is it the shadowy realm of fairy tales and myth that actually comes to life in the Scwarzwald? I don't know for certain. And I don't know why I am drawn to the name. It certainly was important enough mythologically for the Hamburg-American ship line to name a vessel "Thuringa". But was it more? I have found only footnotes about some Knights of Thuringia, a sideways reference to them and only one line out of a handfull of texts that leads one to believe that they were more than myth. A Knight of Thuringia persuaded a Spanish Catholic to join the battle of Acre led by Guy de Lusignan, King of Jerusalem in 1189. This puts the knights with the Templars of the Teutonic order. And there again, rather than be content with being lumped in with the entire brotherhood of Teutonic knights, they are a body within the body, the Ritter von Thuna.
And the most frustrating thing of all is the way that things are spelled. There are alternate spellings for the Lauensteins with no clear indication that they are not completely interchangeable save for the bigotry of labeling one spelling German and the other Jewish. But as far back as I can trace the name Lauenstein as a city/ place/ region/ estate, the only thing sources agree on was that the name comes from a guy known as Henry the Lion. Lion, the noun is spelled Loewe... as in Lowes home improvement stores. And as fascinating as this is, I can't figure out exactly how this impacted the family. Nor can I understand how it is important to know beyond my gut telling me that this is somewhere to look. Grampa mentioned a family name a few times... Orlamund. I always thought that it was a pretty name and I made it a princesses name in the first story I wrote as a child. Orlamunds are connected to Thuringia as being a prominent family in possession of a Schloss Lauenstein. But still... nothing that brings these people forward or makes them more important than the historic footnotes that they are.
Oh its great fun. And if it were easy I wouldn't be thinking I should go to Germany myself. But I would have some very pretty scrapbook pages with family history in them. And I would feel I understand myself a little more. I do have some measure of understanding. Knowing that the tendency for Saxons to be notoriously difficult to subjugate as they have an instinct toward resistance makes everything my grampa taught me about questioning authority more understandable than ever. Resistance is in my blood... assimilate this! And the connection to the templars, even if only as a prominent body in the region where the family hails from, makes this innate quest for deeper truths much more poignant. Not only have I looked beyond the bounds of church and state for the answers that my soul knows are out there, so has Brian. It now is only a matter of making the quest and the results matter in the modern world.
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