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cahnLast post, we had (among other things) Danish kings and their favorites; Louis XIV and Philippe d'Orléans; reviews of a very shippy book about Katte, a bad Jacobite novel, and a great book about clothing; a fic about Émilie du Châtelet and Voltaire; and a review of a set of entertaining Youtube history videos about Frederick the Great.
More Peter Keith findings
Date: 2023-04-08 02:17 pm (UTC)Good news: I have found the archives that have the most (afaict) Keith family papers! There's a bunch of stuff in the Niedersachsen Archives, presumably because Peter married into the Knyphausen family, and the Knyphausens were an East Frisian family in origin. I found this because one 19th century volume prints a single letter from Fritz to Peter that we hadn't found yet. Nothing terribly interesting in that letter (I will post details in salon), but the volume in question pointed me to the Niedersachsen Archives. The online catalogue contains such exciting descriptions as:
1. Papiere zur Familie von Keith
Enthält: u.a. Nachlaß des Feldmarschalls von Keith und des Oberstleutnants und Akademiedirektors von Keith 1757 - 1774
My note: That has to be academy curator, but since I've seen him called a Generalleutnant (lol) elsewhere, I still think it's probably our Peter. 1757 is just in time to be his Nachlaß, since he died Dec 27, 1756, and the papers could have been put in a bundle marked 1757 when they changed hands.
2. Der Nachlaß des Freiherrn Karl Ernst Reinhard von Keith
1764 - 1823
My note: I care less about Karl Ernst (Peter's son), but he might have inherited some stuff that he kept. What I really want are Peter's memoirs, if they still exist! I bet Kloosterhuis didn't check these archives, he was researching Katte and had no reason to!
3. Familiennachrichten, Bestallungen, Korrespondenzen, Rechnungssachen, Kuriosa usw. zur Familie von Keith
Enthält: u.a. Verfügungen Friedrichs des Großen an den Oberstleutnant und den Legationsrat von Keith 1729 - 1774
My note: 1729?!! Is there any chance that the note that Karl Ernst talks about, in which Crown Prince Fritz promised to reward Peter, which Peter carried with him for 10 years and pissed Fritz off by showing him in 1740, still survives?? Could it be possible we could turn it up?? Even if not, literally anything from 1729 would be amazing. We have so little, because so much got destroyed in 1730.
Bad news: It doesn't seem I can order digital copies of these documents, only request to visit in person. The Niedersaschen archives are not American-friendly like the Prussian archives! :'D (The Saxon archives, which I turned up last week, are semi-American-friendly, in that I haven't found the ability to place orders, but significant portions are digitized and freely available.)
Good news(?): I think this archive is in the same quadrant of Germany as you! It's in Aurich, and I can't find it now but I seem to recall you saying you were at least in northwest Germany?
Bad news: You are really busy! Also possibly moving to Potsdam later this year? (That's really good news for the rest of our fandom purposes, but not for the specific purpose of the Niedersachsen Archiv. :'D)
Other bad news: the specific collections I want to access are restricted (curses!), and I would have to apparently jump through hoops to see if they'll give me permission, it's not a matter of straightforward ordering.
Is it worth my time to try to get permission for you to view these materials on my behalf? Could you conceivably play research assistant and visit Aurich (at a time of your choosing)? Say, if I covered travel costs and gave you some compensation for your time and expertise? On a scale of 1-10, how excited are you by this finding? ;)
We shall see what
Re the letter I refer to, it's very business-like, but here it is:
J'ai vu par la lettre que vous m'avez fait le 18. de ce mois que la terre de la Britz a été vendue, et je suis bien satisfait qu'elle ait été conservée à la famille de Knyphausen, et que ce soit le conseiller d'ambassade qui en ait fait l'acquisition. Sur ce. etc.
Potsdam le 21 Decembre 1753
Now, Britz I recognize from my Peter research.
Remember the box of money Fritz gave Peter in 1750? That was supposedly for his mother-in-law, the Baroness von Knyphausen? According to Hanway, this was all an elaborate pretense to give Peter money, but officially the gift was to compensate for some trivial damage that had been done to her lawns when Fritz staged a mock battle there as part of the carousel. The lawns in question were on her estate of Britz, which is just outside Berlin (of the time--now in Berlin).
The Baroness died in 1751, and she must have left it to Ariane and Peter. In 1753, they sold it. Now, the internet tells me in multiple places that they had sold it to Hertzberg, whom we have encountered before, and who had just married to Ariane's sister Hyma Maria in 1752. Hertzberg is buried in the church there.
The 1877 volume in which I found this letter, says they sold it to Ariane's brother Dodo Heinrich, who, you may recall, was the guy Fritz sent to London as an ambassador when the Seven Years' War broke out (remember that he had refused to send Peter about 10 years earlier and just left a secretary).
I suspect Hertzberg is correct, but it's just possible that it changed hands again within the Knyphausen family.
In any case, Fritz and Peter at least had some more business contact, and also, re that letter to Fritz about the bridges in Berlin that
ETA: Prinzsorgenfrei has come through, not only offering to go to the archive (time and permission permitting), but has volunteered useful information on tracking down who to contact for permission! Now I'm off to see if I can get the Knyphausens to give me permission to view the documents.