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UPDATED:
07/14/08
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Wolfgang Dreuse, a Bus'd'ker descendant and creator of a site on the
Buer area and families, reported meeting another German researcher,
Friedrich Hensiek, who has references to the Bussdiecker farm
from 1500 to 1630.
Friedrich is descended from Johann Heinrich Bussdieker, son of Johann Adam Buschdiecker, grandson of Ernst Heinrich Buschdiecker, and great-grandson of Johann Ernst Heinrich Buschdiecker. Descendants of Johann Heinrich were not known to us before this report. |
The references are from tax records and census reports. Those old records do not give the names of any ancestors earlier than the ones we already knew, but they do tell us that the farm existed around the time that Columbus discovered America, and say a little bit about the residents. Wolfgang has a copy of the earliest record that says, "AD 1500, to den Buschdike, head, wife and 4 people". |
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The first Bus'd'kers for whom we have a continuous line of descendants are Anton Caspar Bußdiecker and Cath. Engel Türls. The "ß" is a ligature, or typesetting combination, that represents the letters "ss". Anton was born in 1713, nearly three centuries ago. He and Cath. (probably Catherine) were married in 1734 and lived in a place called "Am Bussdieck" near the town of Buer (pronounced BOO-er), a few miles east of Osnabruck. You can see where it is located and learn something about the area by going to the page titled Political Maps. The exact location of the farm is show on the Roadmaps page. Click on picture for enlarged version. |
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Other towns in the area which are mentioned in the family history are Melle (sister city of New Melle, Missouri), and Sehlingdorf. That area is in the state of Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony), whose capital is Hannover, in the northern part of Germany. Those places used to be part of the Kingdom of Hanover. Some of our ancestors said that they came from "Hanover" (the kingdom), which some descendants mistakenly thought meant the city of Hannover.
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The historic family farm estate called Am Bussdieck for "Auf Dem Bussdieck" ("On the Bussdieck" ). Since a German from Berlin is called a Berliner, from Frankfurt a Frankfurter, and so on, one who lived on the Bussdieck would be called a Bussdiecker. Click on map for enlarged version. |
In that area in the 1700's there was a class in society known as Erbkoetterschaften (or Erbkötterschaften) who had a hereditary right to live on a particular section of land, although they did not hold title to it. At least some of the Buschdieckers fell in this category.
One of the ways that the Erbkoetterschaften earned the right to live on the land was to do the work required to convert unusable land into farmland. Much of the area around "Am Bussdieck" is marshy, wooded, or covered with underbrush. The German word "Busch" means not only "bush", but also woods and underbrush. The word "Dieck" is a from local dialect of Plattdeutsche, or low German, that means "pond". "Am Bussdieck" therefor means "at the woods pond".Top
There have been many changes in the spelling of the family name ... Buschdiecker, Bußdiecker, Bussdiecker, and there have been many more changes since then. No one has kept the original spelling, but we now have spellings that range from Busdeker to Buszdieker to Bushdiecker to Bussdiker. There are first cousins who spell the name differently.
We use the term "Bus'd'ker" here to relate to all who
carry the family name since our ancestors were not consistent in their
spelling of the name. One of Caspar and Catherine's great-grandchildren's headstone spells the name
"Buscdierker" while his birth certificate spelled it "Bussdieker". A
cousin spelled it Bussdiecker.
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When the Bus'd'kers came to the United States, they settled in two widely separated areas. Hermann Heinrich and his children settled in the area around Woodville, Pemberville, and Luckey east of Toledo, Ohio. Johann Ernst and his children apparently came up the Mississippi and settled in the area around New Melle and St Charles, Missouri, just north and west of St Louis. Today those two areas have the largest concentrations of Bus'd'kers, although we are now spread all over the United States. Descendants in Germany today seem to be concentrated in or or around Buer, Melle and Osnabrück.
If you are a Bus'd'ker and are not listed on one of the family trees, send me email (click here) or "snail mail" (the postal service) with enough information to connect you into the tree. If you do not have that information, send what you do have and we'll try to find the connection. I started with next to nothing a few years ago ... and no one else had it all together, either!.
If you can add to the story, I'd like to hear from you!
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