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cahnNot only are these posts still going, there is now (more) original research going on in them deciphering and translating letters in archives that apparently no one has bothered to look at before?? (Which has now conclusively exonerated Fritz's valet/chamberlain Fredersdorf from the charge that he was dismissed because of financial irregularities and died shortly thereafter "ashamed of his lost honor," as Wikipedia would have it. I'M JUST SAYING.)
Peter and Ariane's marriage
Date: 2023-06-22 03:49 pm (UTC)I originally figured the first one was more likely to be correct since it had a date, and thus Kloosterhuis was probably staring at it when he wrote it, whereas with the second one he might have been going from memory.
Then I realized the second one was just him summarizing what Karl Ernst said, and I figured since the first one had a documentary source and the second was a letter written almost a hundred years after the fact, that Kloosterhuis was correctly reporting both his sources, and it was Karl Ernst's memory that was faulty.
*Then* I started getting my hands on the actual archive documents Kloosterhuis cites, and I realized he was not citing a marriage record, as I expected, but just a genealogy that was obviously written many years after, and gets other dates wrong. *Then* I started thinking Karl Ernst might be a more reliable source after all! He knew his mother most of his life, and she might have mentioned it/gotten nostalgic/etc.
Yesterday, I realized that among the documents in my possession is what looks like a marriage contract between Peter and Ariane. It's 8 pages long, in bureaucratic German, and so I haven't read it yet, but it contains words like "Brautigam Herr Peter Christoph Carl", "Braut" and "Morgengabe", so I'm deducing a marriage contract.
Unfortunately, the first page or pages (I suspect 1 sheet of paper written on both sides) is missing! I confirmed with the archive that they do not have the missing page in their possession and that they digitized everything they had for me.
Fortunately, the final page is the one with the date, and it says "17 August", which means I think we have caught Kloosterhuis relying on another inaccurate source.
(I was shocked how many of Kloosterhuis' claims about the Keith family names, birth, and death dates came from these genealogies and not from, as I was assuming, official baptism, marriage, and burial records. Not that those are perfect, but at least if you have a book with a list of entries that are all from November 1764, and the previous section is October 1764 and the next two sections are December 1764 and January 1765, and you know they were entered as they happened, you can place a pretty high confidence in a belief that your event took place in November 1764, even if the details entered are wrong. (I say this because these genealogies have given me numerous years for Friedrich Ludwig's death ranging from 1762-1765, but his burial record is November 1764.))
Anyway, we have Peter's marriage contract, and it's on my list of documents to come back to! (A lot of what I'm doing is going through the 1500 pages making notes of which image numbers contain which information, and what I want to come back to later.
P.S. In all the documents I've found, Lower Saxon archives, Prussian archives, and church records, Ariane's name is spelled "Oriane/Oriana", and once "Origana." The only contemporary source I've seen spell it "Ariane" was Formey, which I originally went with because that was the first contemporary source I had that referred to her by first name at all! Plus that's how Kloosterhuis spelled it, so I figured that was what she used.
I now think "Oriane" is more accurate, but "Ariane" is embedded in my memory. I wrote fic using that name! So while I plan to update the spelling in my essay, she will remain Ariane for me in salon, so we don't all have to get used to a new spelling. (These people all had several spellings of their names anyway.)
Names: (Peter) Karl Ernst
Date: 2023-06-22 11:33 pm (UTC)[1775-1776: Geheime Staatskanzlei + Royal Envoy at foreign courts: Peter Carl v. Keith, Legations-Rath, Königlicher Kammerherr and Envoyé Extraordinaire at the Turin Court, is absent [therefore no adress]]
1777/78: same as 1776
1779-83: listed in the Court section: Peter Carl v. Keith, lives "in der Breiten Strasse"
in the Geheime Staatskanzlei section: Ernst Reinhard Carl v. Keith, lives "in der Breiten Strasse im Dammschen Hause"
1784-87: Court section: Peter Carl v. Keith, "s. Geheime Staatskanzlei"
Geheime Staatskanzlei: Ernst Reinhard Carl v. Keith, "Taubenstraße im Friedelschen Hause"
+ 1787: Widow Keith mentioned for the first time
1788: the court mention finally changes from "Peter Carl" to "Ernst Reinhard Carl"
Having now been through a *lot* of correspondence, genealogies, and official documents, I can say that so far, I've only seen one "Peter Carl", and it's 1772. What's interesting is that it's an official form granting "Peter Carl" a post as royal chamberlain, and it's signed by Leining, and there is an exactly identical form granting "Carl Ernst" a different post, signed by Leining, dated 1765!
So I feel like possibly he started including Peter in his name in the 1770s, but had given it up by the time we start getting more documents in the 1790s and beyond.
There's also a catalogue entry in the Prussian archive for his correspondence as envoy to Turin starting in 1772 that lists his name as Peter Carl, but I have scans of the documents (of course I do), and I see no mention of any first names, so the archivists are probably going by some other document, possibly the one I found.
Names: Federico (Ruggerio)
Date: 2023-06-22 11:52 pm (UTC)Now, I remembered that a few months ago, Selena told us that "my fave's second name was Roger - Federico Ruggiero in Italian." And indeed, I find that Horst says that. In fact, he says that it's due to German nationalist historians preferring to drop the name "Roger" as part of a one-sided attempt to claim Friedrich as German, not Italian.
However, I find that Rader says "maybe" about "Roger" as a second name, and Houben says "maybe" with even more detailed source criticism. Houben:
We do not know when and where Friedrich was baptized. It can be assumed that this happened at the end of 1196, possibly under the double name Roger Friedrich, which would refer to his grandfathers, Roger II of Sicily and Frederick I Barbarossa. At least that's what one reads in the well-informed annals of Montecassino, and there is probably also a play on it by the poet Peter of Eboli (near Salerno), when, in a historical epic dedicated to Henry VI in the spring 1195, he wrote: “O welcome boy, epoch of the time of Renewal, from now on you will be Roger, from now on Friedrich" (O votive puer, renovandi temporis etas,/ Exhinc Rogerius, hinc Fredericus eris). In the majority of contemporary historians, however, the only name used is Friedrich, which is also the only one used in documents.
So it does not appear from this that modern nationalist historians are to blame.
In general, being partway through all three bios, I find that whenever Dirk, Rader (2010), and Houben (2008) are at pains to dismiss a legend by means of source criticism, such as the legend that young Friedrich roamed the streets and went hungry until the locals took turns feeding him for a week, Horst (1975) uncritically repeats the legends without any source analysis or skepticism.
I thought you might like to know this, Selena, since Friedrich's your fave.
(We were supposed to have this discussion way back in January when you were answering a question a day, and I picked "stupor mundi" as mine, but I fell behind on both the podcast and my German reading. Now I'm going to fall behind again, but I thought I'd get this result of last weekend's reading out there before I forget.)