About Zeuschner Family Tree Worldwide
Please sign in to see more. The interest in my family relationship was as a result of research started in 1959 when as a young man I worked in a Melbourne suburb called Windsor. I 'filled in time' at the Melbourne Public Library while waiting to attend an evening class at nearby Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.
I looked at any literature that might contain the name ZEUSCHNER. This was in most part made up of telephone books, electoral rolls, etc.
When I discovered a Zeuschner in Queensland or South Australia I would make a note of the individual's name and then on my next visit home to the family farm at Stony Creek in Gippsland, ask my parents what the relationship was.
On a few occasions they were unable to provide the information but asked others of the family who lived nearby and had a small knowledge of where some of the Zeuschner family had spread to.
This interest has never left me, and the advent of the internet and the growing wealth of information found within it, has provided many hours of pleasure and satisfaction. I discovered Zeuschners in USA quite unexpectedly and have researched their connections with each other and of their roots in Germany. I have searched the family name found in Germany, back as far as 1667, but as yet cannot link many within those three countries.
I know that there is quite a lot of information that has not been included and large portion of family names are not yet connected, other names, particularly those which relate to the generation of post 1960's are yet to be entered.
If you are a visitor to this site and believe you have any information that will enhance the history and value of the contents, please contact me and I will include it.
As for our Prussian roots, I had no idea that so many wars and skirmishes had taken place in that part of Europe over the centuries, this fact presents a problem for collecting intact and easily linked information.
Another disruption to the collection of family information is the huge death rate of the population as a result of disease. (Cholera)
I have a theory that the family name may have originated in Austria, centuries ago. The name Zeuschner and indeed a number of Prussian names of the era seem to indicate an origin other than that area now known as west Germany.
Posen
Also known as "Posen, Germany", "Posen, Prussia", "Province of Posen", "Provinz Posen", "Poznan, Poland", "Grand Duchy of Poznan", "South Prussia", "Wielkopolska".
From the Second Partition (1793) until the end of WWI (1919), this part of the world was a Prussian province, except for the decade in the early 1800s when Napoleon was in control.
A Polish land, also known as 'Wielkopolska' ("Great Poland"), the area's boundaries have remained generally intact, being defined by the watersheds of the rivers Warthe / Warta (in the south) and Netze / Notec~ (in the north). Both rivers flow from the southeast to the northwest, the Netze emptying into the Warthe in the western neighbor of Brandenburg, which in turn empties into the Oder / Odra as it flows north to the Baltic sea.
Other neighbors were the Prussian provinces of West Prussia / Westpreußen (to the northeast), Silesia / Schlesien (to the southwest) and the Russian-controlled "Congress Poland" to the east.
The province received its name from its capital city Posen / Poznan~. The Prussians split the province into two administrative parts, giving Posen jurisdiction of the southern part and assigning Bromberg / Bydgoszcz as the administration center for the northern part.
If an ancestor stated "Posen" as the birthplace or residence, it is uncertain whether the reference was to the city ('Stadt'), its county ("Kreis" ), the administrative district ('Regierungsbezirk') or the province ('Provinz').
Finger lakes and weavers' looms. The bleating of lambs in the spring, the chopping of trees in the forest. Rural communities, each with its own ethnic flavor, existing as a pocket in a countryside littered with ethnic enclaves. Polish Catholics, German Protestants and Jews. Serfs and nobles, colonists and merchants. Rural roads, brick houses, manor houses, distilleries, water and animal-powered mills, brickyards, peat workings, prayer barns and hopeful churches, markets in the town square, forests and mud. The Netze and Warthe rivers draining not just surface water, but the fruits of labor of a million backs, to places that were well-known but rarely seen. Oppression and tolerance. Opportunity and stagnation. A new frontier in a left-over, hand-me-down land, ravaged by war, fires and epidemics. These are some of the images that unfold as we strive to learn more about the so-very-different-world that our ancestors loved and struggled in as they strove to make life better for themselves and their children, who in turns, became us. That was the beginning of a journey so long, so complicated, that our families have forgotten the details. Working together, we can discover the little clues that restore the lost ballads to our minds and those of our kin. *
*Posen-L Website |