Frederick the Great discussion post 15

[cahn]

...I have nothing clever to say here, just really pleased this is still going :)
rheinsberg

Comments

Re: Lehndorff

[mildred_of_midgard]

I think I had the overall two kids from a previous wiki entry (which however als had her dying in the 1770s as opposed to surviving to have tea with Lehndorff in the 1780s), but I'm not completely sure.

No, I remember it too, both the 2 kids and the impossibly early death date. Like some other entries, it's been recently updated (it seems one of the Wiki contributors recently discovered Kloosterhuis, among other things).

I scanned those family trees from Martin for you, do they have something? (Either in the way of kids or birthdays?)

No, unfortunately, that branch of the family tree stops with Heinrich Christoph (Hans Heinrich's brother), None of his kids or their spouses or kids.

Easiest possibility: some clerk made a mistake about her birth date when registering her death.

Or Wikipedia being wrong! I still have no source on her birthday (it's not Kloosterhuis).

I just remembered: Ellen Ternan, the actress with whom Dickens was in love, in her later years took a whole decade from her age and had in fact that wrong date written on her tombstone

Laura Ingalls Wilder's husband Almanzo evidently raised his age by 2 years, which can only be confirmed by very early census records. His tombstone, his wife, and every other source give the older age. So definitely not impossible! If du Rosey was really born in 1733 and later subtracted 5 years from her age, she'd have been 16 in 1749, which is a reasonable age for a proposal from a 26-yo, given the time, especially if, as you speculated, her parents thought she was too young.

Or there could have been a clerkly error or guess, similarly off by about 5 years.

And no, I can't see a proposal to an eleven years old being done at that time, either. These weren't the Middle Ages anymore, and the extended Lehndorff-du Rosey-tribe were East Prussian nobility, not royalty.

Indeed, and a dynastic marriage to an eleven-year-old arranged by parents is different from Lehndorff proposing out of love and being deeply disappointed. Even if we take his 1751 year and assume the archive is wrong, thirteen years old seems a bit much, even for the times! His two actual marriages, assuming the dates in Wikipedia are correct, are to a 17-yo and an 18-yo.

The extra kids are interesting, though, especially the dates. Did she relent eventually? None of the sources I'm seeing are indicating that Ludolf had those kids, though--we still only have Wikipedia's word for that.

but that's the archive dating, and not having seen the contents of the box

So, I'm thinking, learning to master hand-written Rokoko French would be an excellent next project for you! You can start with German: we do have all those Fredersdorf letters to look up, after all. ;)