Stockwendish

Bill Biar, who grew up in Thorndale, Texas and lived in Carrollton, Texas until he passed away on 30 Oct 2012 was a dedicated researcher and prolific writer of things Wendish.  He was a dedicated Christian who wrote 40 hymns set to to traditional Lutheran music and often, along with his wife, Steffi, assisted the Concordia Historical Institute in St Louis, Missouri by transliterating and translating German documents and letters.  He had made significant contributions of books, papers, and electronic media files to the Texas Wendish Heritage Society, in Serbin, Texas.  This blog is an attempt to take his electronic media files and make them available to everyone.

We decided to use the term “Stockwendish” to identify this blog.  If you do not know what “stockwendish” means, you will need to read on.  Clicking on a title below will take you directly to the subject you click on.

 

Stockwendisch

The Sorbs (Wends)

The Manorial System

Hill-Forts

Christianization of the Wends

What’s in a Name?

Alias – Gennant

Place Names

Half-Timbered Construction

Some Observations about Researching the Wends

My Foreign-born Ancestors Who Came to Texas

Emancipation of the Peasants in Silesia and Saxony

The Oder-Neisse Line

Provinces (Länder) of Modern Germany after Unification

German Immigration from 1821 to 1900

Old Lutheranism and the Wends

German Immigration to the USA

The table shows the German migration to the United States from 1821-1900*. 1821-1830             9,987 1831-1840         157,265 1841-1850         439,270 1851-1860         976,678** 1871-1880         781,273 1881-1890      1,641,571 1891-1900         728,348 Total               5,552,946 * Taken from Deutsch-Amerikanische Geschichtsblaetter, Vol III, No. 3 on page 30. ** Includes the large Wendish immigration of 1854.

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Provinces (Länder) of Modern Germany After Unification of 1990

Names of the provinces of modern Germany in German and English. GERMAN                                                      ENGLISH Baden-Würtemberg                                      Baden-Wuertemberg Bayern                                                        Bavaria Berlin                                                          Berlin Brandenburg                                                Brandenburg Bremen                                                       Bremen Hamburg                                                     Hamburg Hessen                                                        Hesse Mecklenburg-Vorpommern                             Mecklenburg-West Pomerania Niedersachsen                                              Lower Saxony Nordrhein-Wesfallen                                      North Rhine-Westphalia Rheinland-Pfalz                                          

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Emancipation of the Peasants in Silesia and Saxony

The emancipation of the peasants of Silesia was set in motion by the Oktoberedikt of 1807. This edict brought many reforms which abolished the feudal system.  It freed the peasants as of St. Martin’s Day (November 11), 1810.  The emancipation set aside servile or compulsory labor and services of the peasant class.  Those peasants who did

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Place Names

Nearly all information for this article was taken from Die Ortsname der Oberlausitz (Place Names of Upper Lusatia) by Jan Meschang. (Please note that throughout this article the German Umlaut is used.  This simply means that quite often the diacritical mark (“) appears over the vowels a, o and u to indicate umlauts.  It would

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What’s in a Name

Besides written records, onomastics ( the science and study of the origins and forms of proper names of persons and places)  may be used to study and interpret the historical, linguistic and cultural development of an area.  Slavic tribes living in isolation fostered dialects, whose particularisms were reflected in names.  As tribes moved to new

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