Dear folks, I got several responses to my last posting and thought I'd put out a little summary of Eichsfeld history, for your additions and corrections. Many of you are much more experienced than I, and have been investigating this beautiful region for longer than one year. My Catholic Eichsfelder ancestral surnames include Bohme, Brodmann, Gabel, Gassdorf, Goebel (2), Hagedorn, Hartlieb, Heinemann, Hey (2), Junemann?,Kobert?, Kruse (3), Kuhn, Muller(2), Rehbein, Schnemann, Schuchardt, Steinmetz, Thieme, and Wollf. If I get a chance to check parish registers next year the surnames will greatly increase. In the 13th generation we have 8192 ancestors. Many villages had fewer than 400 inhabitants who left descendants who survive today. I'm sure every one in little villages, where people have intermarried for 13 generations, shares at least one blood line with his neighbors. Village families were not immobile, however. In Steinbach, for instance, only about 4 of about 40 surnames found before the 30 years war occurs after the war. There was some inheritance through daughters, I imagine, but many villagers sold out, fled, or died of famine, plague or war. Outsiders, fleeing similar conditions elsewhere, moved in when their own latest disaster was over. Usually a third of a peasant's farm produce went to his lay and clerical overlords, a third fed his family and another third was seed for the next year's crop. One of the three had to "give" when harvests were bad, and landlords could enforce their demands, so peasant children often starved in years following successive bad harvests in the 1480's, 1490's and 1518-1519. If a peasant was unable to pay rent, he could work as a farm hand, and marry later. Peasants were usually tenants, and were not bound to the land like serfs. But even serfs had rights. In the middle ages if a serf resided in a free town for a year, he became free. The peasant revolt led by Thomas Minter of nearby Mulhausen in the 1520's fascinates me. It was part of the largest peasant uprising in Western history. Over 100,000 of the 300,000 peasants involved were killed in the revolt, or executed afterwards! Due to bad harvests in 1518 and 1519 it was impossible for peasants to pay the great tax (in wheat) and still have enough to eat and to plant the following spring. Hans Boheim, a Wurtzberg Shepherd who saw a vision of Mary, was a leveler who preached to crowds of 40,000 in Niklashausen, before being burned at the stake by the Bishop of Wurtzberg. The banner of the revolt was a flag depicting the foot wrappings (Bundschuh) of peasants too poor to afford leather soles. Their 1525 manifesto contained 12 demands including the abolition of serfdom, for fewer services to landlords, more rights to hunt small game and pick up wood in the forests, elimination of the small tithes (paid in sheep, barley, acorns and other incidental farm produce), and the right to elect their own pastors. The peasants set up an alternative government based on a free assembly, which even Martin Luther found subversive. Durrer's "Monument to defeated peasants" drawing shows a peasant stabbed in the back at the top of a pillar of farm implements. It was not just peasants who rebelled. In 1522 many knights also rebelled, because of the encroachment of the territorial princes like the Schwartzburgs of Sonderhausen on their privileges, and because both knights and towns were marginalized by the advent of cannon and siege warfare, and both nights and burgers wanted freedom of conscience. Prior to the Prussian occupation of Eichsfeld in 1803 religious institutions kept the best records of land holdings, but I am not sure of the conditions of Eichsfeld land tenure. The Archbishop of Mainz was the ultimate landlord, and church records in Mainz should contain lists of Eichsfeld villagers from 1300 AD onward, but they would not be indexed. Does anyone know anything about Kur-Mainzer records 1200-1803? Does anyone know about the Prussian land and police records after 1803? The civil office in Heiligenstadt was uncooperative in locating land documents, perhaps because titles have been disputed after the fall of East German Communism. What do others do? Yours cordially, Peter Kruse Wilson