Traces in the Sand
Trąbczyn is a village and estate in central Poland, in the country between Konin and Kalisz. This is its archive: the papers of the people who owned it, sold it, settled it and went to law over it, in the original German, French and Polish and in English translation. What is published so far covers the eleven years a Prussian prince held the place, the nine he spent trying to get it back, and the dispute over his debts on the estate, which ran on until 1832.
Browse the documents
All 613 documents, searchable in full and filterable by year, person, place and condition.
Timeline
How many documents survive from each year, and what was happening around them.
People
Who appears in these documents, how firmly each is identified, and where to find them.
About this edition
What the edition contains, where the documents are held, and how far the text can be relied on.
About this project
Poland was partitioned out of existence between 1772 and 1795. Trąbczyn ended up in the Prussian share, and in 1796 the King gave it away, to Friedrich Ludwig, Prince of Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen, a general who ran it from Silesia and needed it to pay his debts. He sent Peter Friedrich von Triebenfeld, Councillor of War and Forests, to turn land into money.
The way to do that was to break the estate up. The land the lord farmed himself was divided into holdings and let out for good, to farmers and to Hollanders: settlers who held on a Dutch-derived tenure and had been clearing and draining land in this part of Poland for generations. The contracts survive: what each man paid, what he owed every year, and what he gave up to get it.
Prussia lost the war of 1806 and the estate went with it. The letters run on for nine more years, through an arrest, thirty-one lawsuits at once and a winter at the Congress of Vienna, and end with a liquidation register listing debts of Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen of 1,414,377 Reichsthaler.