Three Families in Stolzenhain

The Tischendorfs

Gottfried Tischendorf was born on 5 October 1745 in Stolzenhain. The household register spells it Stolzenhaijn, the older form of the name. He was not an outsider who settled there; he was from the village, and his family was already rooted in its soil before the registers that record him were opened. Stolzenhain was a small place: the household register covers twenty-two numbered properties in all, each one a farmstead with its own history, passed down through families or sold when a line died out. No. 13 was the Tischendorf holding.

He married Maria Sophia Mahler in 1776. She came from Langendorf near Weißenfels, born 1 April 1760, and was fifteen years his junior. Together they had eleven children, born between 1778 and 1799: Johanna Regina, Carl Gottfried, Johanna Rosina, Christiana Sophia, Susanna Maria, Maria Elisabett, Maria Sophia, Johann Heinrich David, Rosina Rebecca, Johanna Rosina, and Johann Gottfried. Two of the children died in infancy; the rest survived into adulthood.

Gottfried held the position of Amtsschöppe (local magistrate) in the village. The register notes his title alongside his name. The Tischendorf name already meant something in Stolzenhain before him: a Christian Tischendorf, almost certainly a kinsman, had been the church's principal organ benefactor across a span of decades. In 1766, together with neighbors from Stolzenhain, Samuel Nachbar and others from the Binderthal properties, Christian funded the renovation of the church organ for fifty Thaler. In 1769 he gave again, this time for a new two-manual instrument. In 1770 he gave once more. His widow gave the congregation an embroidered velvet pulpit curtain in 1800. For more than thirty years, it was Tischendorf money that gave the congregation its music.

The church itself was not spared by history. On 9 November 1800, a violent storm struck the village and set fire to the priest's house and the schoolteacher's buildings; both burned to the ground. As work began on the damaged church, the finial from the steeple was taken down. Inside it, sealed since 1732, was a written history of the church: it recorded the names of the clergy, the patron, and the craftsmen who had built it, written out in full and preserved in the copper ball at the top of the spire. The workers copied down what it said, then re-sealed the finial with fresh notes and new coins alongside the old document. On 14 June 1801, before the work was finished, the Kirchendachstuhl (the timber roof structure) collapsed at midday with a crash, destroying what remained of the old vault.

The Tischendorf property at No. 13 had its own history of fire. The register records a fire there on 30 January 1746, the year after Gottfried was born. Lightning struck the Scheune at the neighboring property No. 1 on 28 July 1787 and the blaze spread to surrounding buildings. Then came the worst: on the evening of 12 July 1813, fire broke out in No. 13 itself at nine o'clock. The register's account is brief and final. All the buildings were immediately set ablaze. Nothing was saved: no livestock, no possessions. Several cattle burned. Neighbors from Stolzenhain arrived quickly, and because the night was still, the fire did not spread to other properties. The loss was total.

By 1810, before his own death, Gottfried transferred the property to his son Johann Heinrich David. His eldest son Carl Gottfried was assigned to half of the neighboring property at No. 15 instead. It was the eldest daughter, Johanna Regina, whose descendants would carry the family story forward.

Johanna Regina and the Krauses

Johanna Regina Tischendorf was born on 28 July 1778, the first of the eleven children. She married Johann Carl Krause of Pötewitz on the third Sunday after Easter, Dominica Jubilate, in 1807. Krause was a Meister, a master of his trade, from the neighboring village. The marriage took place in Pötewitz, through the Zschorgula parish.

Within weeks of the wedding, Johanna Regina gave birth to a daughter, Christiane Friederike, born on 10 June 1807. The child was baptized in Stolzenhain, and her grandfather Gottfried Tischendorf was among the witnesses.

The marriage did not last. The household register notes the separation with four words: von welchem sie sich scheiden liessen. Carl Krause was from Pötewitz; what ended the marriage is not recorded. Johanna Regina's origin as a Tischendorf of Stolzenhain is confirmed by the Zschorgula marriage register, which names Krause explicitly as Christiane's father: Carl Krauße, Einwohner in Pötewitz.

Johann Gottfried Linßner

While the Tischendorfs were living through fires and marriages in Stolzenhain, another family was taking shape a few miles away near Naumburg. The Linßners were smallholders from Nautschütz.

Gottfried Linßner was born on 18 May 1745 in Nautschütz. He married twice: his first wife, Justina Rebecca Gaudig, died there on 26 January 1794. His second wife was Eva Rebecca Jahn, and it was their son, Johann Gottfried Linßner, who was born on Christmas Eve, 24 December 1802.

Gottfried senior died in Nautschütz on 26 January 1826, at the age of eighty. His widow Eva Rebecca eventually followed her son to Stolzenhain, where she died on 21 July 1834 of Magenverhärtung. She had lived long enough to know her grandchildren.

Johann Gottfried made his way to Stolzenhain as a young man and, in 1827, married Christiane Friederike Krause. He was twenty-four; she was nineteen, and the granddaughter of Gottfried Tischendorf through her mother Johanna Regina. With this marriage, the Tischendorf, Krause, and Linßner lines joined in a single household.

Johann Gottfried established himself steadily in the village. The parish registers trace his rise in their characteristic vocabulary: first a Nachbar, then a Torfgrubeninhaber (owner of a peat bog), and eventually a Gutsbesitzer, a man of property. He opened his Torfgrube in 1831. The household register notes the venture, and then notes its worst consequence: a worker named Helmuth, surname not given, suffocated from noxious gases at the bottom of the peat cutting before the bottom of the excavation had been reached. Peat pits accumulate carbon dioxide as they are dug deeper, invisible and without warning. The register records it the way it records everything: plainly, without sentiment, and without any indication of what followed.

Eleven Children

Between 1827 and 1852, Johann Gottfried and Christiane Friederike had eleven children baptized in Stolzenhain. The registers note each one with the hour of birth, the names of godparents, and the father's occupation, which changed as the family's fortunes grew.

Emilie Pauline arrived on 26 October 1827. Then Gustav on 23 March 1829; Ernestine on 8 April 1831; Auguste on 26 September 1832, who died the following year; Friederike in March 1834; Friederike Henriette on 19 November 1835; Albertine Amalie on 21 October 1837; Carl Friedrich Eduard on 9 May 1839, who died five months later of smallpox; Louise Auguste on 8 August 1841; Theresie Emilie on 2 November 1846 (who would marry into the Zeise family); and finally Laura Gottwalte on 14 April 1852. Her godparents were her own older siblings, Emilie Pauline, Gustav, and Ernestine, a sign of how large the household had grown.

The godparent network ties the family outward across the region: David Gelbke and Hermann Gröber from Pötewitz, Pauline Schumann from Weißenborn, Gottfried Weissmann from Langendorf. The web of kinship and obligation radiates from the village church into the surrounding countryside.

The Summer of 1855

Johann Gottfried Linßner died in June 1855. The death register gives his age as fifty-two years, six months, and nine days, consistent with his Christmas Eve birth in 1802. The cause was Magenerschwächung, stomach weakness, a term the nineteenth century applied to what might today be a range of gastrointestinal conditions. He left a large family but the village register notes only three children still at home.

About four months later, in October 1855, Laura Gottwalte died. She was three years old. The cause was Nervenfieber und Krämpfe, nerve fever and convulsions.

Christiane Friederike died sometime between 1855 and January 1858, when her son Gustav married. The marriage register for that wedding lists both his parents as Weiland, the deceased. No death record for Christiane Friederike has yet been found. In less than three years, the household that Johann Gottfried had built was scattered.

Gustav: Two Marriages, Two Lives

Gustav Linßner, born 23 March 1829, was the oldest son and inherited the Stolzenhain property in the summer of 1855 after his father's death. On 17 January 1858, he married Thekla Eugenie Emma Berthold in Eisenberg. Thekla was a Gutsbesitzerstochter from Saasa, a village in the Zeitz district. Gustav was twenty-eight; she was twenty-one. The banns had been read three times in Eisenberg in the weeks around Epiphany. The ceremony was conducted by the Diaconus Greiner of Eisenberg.

Three weeks after the wedding, on 9 February, their son Friedrich Reinhold was born. He died a week later.

On 16 January 1859, Thekla gave birth in Saasa to a son, Karl Anton Hermann Linßner. At some point the marriage was dissolved — the registers do not say when. Gustav returned to Stolzenhain. Karl Anton grew up in Saasa with his mother, and eventually settled in Prießnitz in the Naumburg district, where he married Amanda Thusnelda Heyer. Thekla followed him there. He died there on 5 January 1938, at the age of seventy-eight.

Gustav's second marriage, on 14 July 1864, was to Friederike Gabler, who came from a Stolzenhain family. She was twenty-eight; he was thirty-five. From this marriage came the Stolzenhain branch of the family that continued in the village. Gustav died in June 1878. Friederike outlived him by nearly twenty-five years, dying on 29 December 1902 at the age of sixty-six. The cause was Lungenleiden, lung disease.

Among their children was Huldreich, born 6 August 1866. He became, like his father and grandfather before him, a Gutsbesitzer in Stolzenhain. In 1897 he married Alma Bertha Ködderitzsch, born 26 May 1871 in Weißenborn.

The Last Linßners in Stolzenhain

Huldreich and Alma had three children. Their first daughter, Frida Elsa, died on 19 February 1899 at four months old. Lydia Lina was born on 23 February 1900, early in the morning, and baptized in Stolzenhain on 24 March by the local pastor. Hildegard Lisbeth was born on 2 April 1903 at three in the morning and baptized two days later.

Huldreich Linßner died on 26 May 1948, at the age of eighty-one, of pneumonia. He had lived through two world wars and seen Saxony change from a Prussian province into something he could not have imagined when he was born. His wife Alma outlived him by three years.

Alma Linßner, née Ködderitzsch, died on 26 November 1951 in Stolzenhain, at the age of eighty. The death register describes her as the widow of the Altbauer Huldreich Linßner, the old farmer. She was survived by her two unmarried daughters, Lydia Lina and Hildegard Lisbeth. The cause of death was arteriosclerosis.

With her death, the name Linßner disappears from the Stolzenhain parish records. The family that Johann Gottfried had planted there in 1827 had continued through four generations: peat-bog owners, farmers, a magistrate's granddaughter, children who lived and children who did not. It had come to its end in the village quietly, in the year that Germany was being divided into two countries.

The name was not finished. Karl raised a family in Prießnitz, and one of his sons, Max Paul Otto Linßner, born 3 July 1897, became a telegraph operator and carried the name into the next generation. Max Paul's son Horst, born in Naumburg in 1924, eventually left Germany altogether. The Stolzenhain chapter was over. The Prießnitz chapter continued. It is from that line that the people reading this article are descended.

The church still stands. The registers are held in the Landeskirchliches Archiv in Magdeburg. The names, Tischendorf, Krause, Linßner, remain in faded Kurrent script on the pages of a Lutheran parish in what is now Saxony-Anhalt.