Vom Niederrhein bis an die Weichsel (English shop)

Der Weg einer Familie durch die Jahrhunderte

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This is the history of a family spanning a period of at least seven centuries.

Originally belonging to the lower nobility, namely in the 13th and 14th centuries, the author’s ancestors came from Cologne to Neuss on the Lower Rhine in 1488. Here, members of the family belonged for a time to the city government and to the ranks of the local notables. Around the middle of the 16th century, however, predominantly religious reasons prompted individual family members to leave Neuss as religious refugees. They moved to Dessau and Ermsleben. And it was from Ermsleben and later Alfeld an der Leine that, as can be documented, the paternal ancestors of the composer Louis Spohr, held in especially high esteem in the 19th century, originated.

The author’s direct ancestors, however, remained Catholic. As a rule, they at first continued to reside and live in Neuss. But the effects of the Thirty Years’ War and the incursions of Louis XIV, as well as personal blows of fate, now led here to extensive impoverishment and to otherwise untenable conditions. For this reason, emigration or flight occurred at the beginning of 1679. A large part of the Spor family now moved to Schlochau, some 850 km to the east, and to the surrounding region. Schlochau, at that time the seat of a Polish starosta, lay and still lies some 120 km south-west of Danzig on the edge of the Vistula lowlands. Those emigrants of the time thus took part in the so-called Second German Eastward Settlement. In 1772, following the First Partition of Poland, Schlochau then became Prussian. And in 1945, as a consequence of the Second World War, the expulsion of almost the entire German population finally took place here as well.

Within this given historical framework, the author combines events and documents from the Middle Ages, the modern era and contemporary history into an impressive, scholarly grounded family biography.