Anyway, I'm assuming motherless child Hans Herrman was raised either by staff and/or relations until the remarriage - given that Wilhelmine and MT were closer to their governesses than their mothers, and Fritz had Keyserlinkg, it would be of interest who did the raising in Katte's case.
Watch me go!
Okay, I have no real data. But Wikipedia, giving no source, says that after his mother died, he went to live with relatives in Doorth near Deventer, and also spent time in Berlin and Wust.
Well, Doorth (henceforth Dorth, as all my other sources give it) and Deventer are in the Netherlands, and we know Hans Hermann went to university in Utrecht. (I had been wondering why Utrecht.)
So that seems reasonable. So then I went looking for which relatives might have been living in Dorth at the time.
I found one uncle on his mother's side, Karl Sophronius Philipp van Flodrop-Wartensleben (1680-1751), who died at Dorth bei Deventer. He was married to a Jeannette Marguerite Margarita Huyssen van Kattendijke (1691-1724).
Now assuming I have the right relatives, they might not have been married yet when little Hans Hermann, aged 3 or 4, showed up in probably 1708. Jeannette was only 16, and their first child isn't born until 1710. But they were probably married and having kids by the time Hans Hermann had memories.
Oh, and they have titles like Graf and Gräfin and die in a Schloss, so staff is probably still doing quite a bit of the raising. But Hans Hermann might have been closer to the Wartensleben side, cousins and aunts and uncles, than his Katte relatives, if it's true he spent substantial time in Dorth. And that might account for the "siblings" in the final letter (plus of course the age difference with the younger ones). Did little sister Sophie Henriette, only 1 year old when her mother died, get sent to Dorth as well? Or were they split up? I have no idea.
Anyway, it's good enough for fanfic, if not for scholarship. ;)
Also for fanfic purposes, I'd been wondering how much Dutch he picked up during his university time. If he spent time in Dorth as a kid, he's presumably anywhere from conversational to (near-?)native, depending on the sociolinguistic situation there.
Re: Kattes and Bismarcks
Watch me go!
Okay, I have no real data. But Wikipedia, giving no source, says that after his mother died, he went to live with relatives in Doorth near Deventer, and also spent time in Berlin and Wust.
Well, Doorth (henceforth Dorth, as all my other sources give it) and Deventer are in the Netherlands, and we know Hans Hermann went to university in Utrecht. (I had been wondering why Utrecht.)
So that seems reasonable. So then I went looking for which relatives might have been living in Dorth at the time.
I found one uncle on his mother's side, Karl Sophronius Philipp van Flodrop-Wartensleben (1680-1751), who died at Dorth bei Deventer. He was married to a Jeannette Marguerite Margarita Huyssen van Kattendijke (1691-1724).
Now assuming I have the right relatives, they might not have been married yet when little Hans Hermann, aged 3 or 4, showed up in probably 1708. Jeannette was only 16, and their first child isn't born until 1710. But they were probably married and having kids by the time Hans Hermann had memories.
Oh, and they have titles like Graf and Gräfin and die in a Schloss, so staff is probably still doing quite a bit of the raising. But Hans Hermann might have been closer to the Wartensleben side, cousins and aunts and uncles, than his Katte relatives, if it's true he spent substantial time in Dorth. And that might account for the "siblings" in the final letter (plus of course the age difference with the younger ones). Did little sister Sophie Henriette, only 1 year old when her mother died, get sent to Dorth as well? Or were they split up? I have no idea.
Anyway, it's good enough for fanfic, if not for scholarship. ;)
Also for fanfic purposes, I'd been wondering how much Dutch he picked up during his university time. If he spent time in Dorth as a kid, he's presumably anywhere from conversational to (near-?)native, depending on the sociolinguistic situation there.
Slowly we start to fill in the blanks...