Sources for the Halberstadt Region

The following sources were used to place villages into Ämter and Ämter into Kreise:

Abel lists all the Ämter with their constituent villages but does not mention Kreise. He includes several villages in Ämter that the other two list outside of Ämter. I interpret the absence of Kreise as evidence that they had not yet been created. However, I include villages in Ämter only if two sources confirm that.

Büsching places each Amt in a Kreis. He makes clear distinctions between Kreis Halberstadt and Kreis Westerhausen, between Kreis Aschersleben and Kreis Ermsleben, and between Kreis Oschersleben and Kreis Weferlingen. However, the last of those contains a single Amt. He makes no reference to a Kreis Hornburg. Amt Schlanstedt is placed in Kreis Halberstadt.

Fabri also places each Amt in a Kreis. He links Kreis Halberstadt and Kreis Westerhausen together, but makes a clean distinction between them (although he forgot Amt Westerhausen, which shows up only in an appendix of errata). He also links Kreis Aschersleben with Kreis Ermsleben, but makes no distinction between them. Similarly, he links Kreis Oschersleben with Kreis Weferlingen, but the distinction is fairly clear as Kreis Weferlingen was geographically isolated and consisted only of the Amt of the same name. Finally, he links Kreis Osterwieck with Kreis Hornburg but does not make any distinction between the two. Amt Schlanstedt is placed in Kreis Oschersleben.

Based on those sources, I propose the following:

  • Imputing a date of 1775 for the creation of Kreise.
  • Recognizing each Kreis mentioned by both Büsching and Fabri in all years between 1775 and 1815 (this excludes Kreis Hornburg, which I suspect Fabri <ahem> fabricated solely for symmetry).
  • Imputing a date of 1800 for the shift of Amt Schlanstedt from Halberstadt to Oschersleben.
  • Creating, out of the various adliche orte in each Kreis, Gerichte and Samtgerichte, based on the following criteria:
    • If more than one village is owned/administered by the same party, assign them to a single Gericht;
    • If only one village is owned/administered by a party, assign it to its own Gericht if it is sufficiently large (a subjective criterion);
    • Otherwise, group the smaller villages in a Kreis into a Samtgericht.
  • Following Büsching’s treatment of the two Domkapitals dörfer in Kreis Halberstadt—namely placing them in a Gericht, which I propose calling Ströbek (Fabri places Ströbek in an Amt with other Domkapitals dörfer in Kreis Aschersleben. He places the other village (Aspenstedt) in the Majorei Amt of Kreis Halberstedt.

An earlier source that I used to track changes in the Kreis Osterwieck area was Digitale Sammlungen: Die Kirchenvisitationen des Bisthums Halberstadt in den Jahren 1564 und 1589 (slub-dresden.de)

Information for Schauen was taken from Digitale Sammlungen / Geschichte der Freien Reichsherrschaft Schauen, eines der allerkleinsten Gebiete im alten deutschen Reich ; nebst fast ausschließlich archivalischen Q […] (uni-duesseldorf.de).

The 1750 date on which Westerburg was fully absorbed by Halberstadt was taken from page 58 of Aus alter und neuer Zeit : vom Dorfe Rohrsheim und der Domäne Westerburg ; im Kreise Halberstadt. (tu-braunschweig.de). Otherwise, page 366 of Büsching and the German Wikipedia article on Westerhausen were useful for sorting out what happened to the former Regenstein territory.

 

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