I. HA GR, Rep. 7 C, Nr. 3709

A file of the Prussian central administration for South Prussia, kept in the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. It concerns the lawsuit of Michalina Prusimska, a minor, against Prince Friedrich Ludwig of Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen (1746-1818) for the Brzyce estates, and runs from 18 June 1800 to 29 January 1802. It holds fifteen documents on 19 pages, in German, with one petition in French.

Historical background

In 1796 the King of Prussia granted Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen estates in South Prussia that had been confiscated from the Starost Antoni Prusimski after the uprising of 1794. Among them was Brzyce in Kujawy. Michalina Prusimska was his daughter. In South Prussia a “Regierung” was the province’s high court, and its councillors also sat on the board that supervised guardianships. In 1807, after Prussia had ceded the province, a Polish commission transferred all the estates to her.

The lawsuit

Prusimska, through her guardian, sued Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen before the Government at Poznań for the recovery of the Brzyce estates [5]. The King’s order of June 1800 describes the case as one over her maternal property [2]. Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen argued that her father, who was still alive, had held a lifetime right in his late wife’s property, and that this right had passed to the fisc with the rest of his confiscated property [6]. In January 1802 Prusimska wrote that the suit had by then lasted four years [15].

Contents

The King calls in the files, June and July 1800. On a complaint from Prusimska the King ordered the Government at Poznań, on 14 June 1800, to send him the files of the case [2]. He returned them on 1 July with the order to finish preparing the case, which had been delayed by indulgence towards the Prince’s agent, to try a settlement, and failing that to give judgment quickly [4]. The Government sent copies of both orders to Berlin with short reports [1, 3].

The Prince asks for other judges, November and December 1800. On 30 November 1800 Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen asked the Grand Chancellor to take the judgment away from Poznań, because the guardianship board that conducted the suit for the plaintiff was made up of the same councillors who would judge it [5]. In a covering letter he added that a settlement proposed by the court’s deputy made him doubt the court’s impartiality [6]. On 7 December the Grand Chancellor ordered that the Government at Warsaw should judge in the first instance and the Kammergericht in Berlin on appeal [7], had rescripts to that effect drafted for the three courts [8, 9, 10], and told the Prince [11].

The order comes too late. The Government at Poznań reported on 18 December that it had already given judgment on 9 December, as the King’s order of July had required speed [12]. The rescript to Warsaw was withdrawn [13] and the Prince informed that the appeal would still go to the Kammergericht [14]. The judgment itself is not in the file, and the file does not say how the court decided.

Prusimska’s petition, January 1802. From Dresden, on 22 January 1802, Prusimska asked the King in French to hasten the appeal. The petition was passed to Minister von der Reck, who had her told on 29 January that she could expect the appeal judgment to be published [15].

Related holdings

The grant of 1796: I. HA GR, Rep. 7 C, Nr. 3570 and Oe 1 Bü 14525. The claim of Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen for compensation after 1807, in which his agent states that Prusimska recovered Brzyce as her mother’s inheritance: III. HA MdA, III Nr. 12765. Papers from the same record group on her father, Antoni Prusimski, at Venice in 1796 and 1797: I. HA GR, Rep. 7 C, Nr. 1414.

Scans

The archive photographed the file as 22 images: a cover and 21 openings of two facing pages. Two blank openings were left out on the editor’s instruction. Fifteen openings with one blank side were cut at the fold to the written side, at a line the editor placed or approved. An opening with writing on both sides was left whole and counts as one page.

Transcription

The editor transcribed the file with a handwriting recognition model, one text for each scan, and read the French petition a second time. The texts were divided into fifteen documents, one for each letter, order or draft. What the receiving office wrote on an incoming letter (the date it arrived, journal numbers, the decision on it) is set apart at the end of that page under its own label.

The transcription was then corrected where something proves the reading: the same sentence in the decree and in the drafts written from it, the same signatures under three reports, a fixed formula, or a form that is no word. 57 words were corrected in this way, and sixteen more in the French petition from the scan. The signatures of the councillors at Poznań were read against the list of that court in the Prussian state handbook for 1800 and 1801. The paraph on the papers issued in the Grand Chancellor’s name is one hand throughout and is given as “G[oldbeck]”, for Heinrich Julius von Goldbeck, who held the office. The draft of 31 December 1800 to the Prince is heavily corrected and poorly read, and is marked as a rough transcription.

Summaries

The summaries were written in German from a reading of each document against its scan, and translated into English. Each statement was then checked against its document, as for the other holdings: of 67 statements two said more than the page does and were weakened (a registry date that had been called the day of receipt, and a referral to the minister that had been ascribed to the Cabinet, which the note does not name).

Translation

Each document was translated in a working session under the same rules as the other holdings: every figure, name and mark of doubt carried across, names in the edition’s settled forms, and passages that do not read left visibly doubtful rather than smoothed. The French petition was translated from the French. The same automatic check as elsewhere then confirmed that every figure and every mark of doubt in the German survives into the English. A translation can only be as good as the transcription under it: the draft of 31 December 1800 to the Prince is badly read, and much of its English is marked as illegible.