von Tiedemann
Low Germany · Vechta, then Danzig and West Prussia
Arms: Adolf Matthias Hildebrandt, in: Alfred von Krane, Wappen- und Handbuch des landgesessenen Adels; Wikimedia Commons, gemeinfrei
The second marriage of Martin von Gerlach, eight years after the death of his first wife. Eva was born on 7 November 1855 at Danzig, where her family had been settled since 1538, and died on 11 April 1945 at Blankenburg in the Harz, five years after her husband and in the last weeks of the war. No children are recorded from either marriage.
A Low German house, recorded since the sixteenth century and presumably older. Caspar Tideman of Vechta in the diocese of Münster settled permanently at Danzig after the great fire of 1538; in the following generations the family married into the Danzig patriciate and into the Pomerelian and Pomeranian nobility. From the end of the sixteenth century it acquired manors in what later became West Prussia, among them Baldow, Prangschin, Russoschin, Woyanow and Goschin, and after West Prussia passed to Prussia in 1772 and Danzig in 1793 it belonged to the landed nobility there. The arms are attested from the middle of the seventeenth century: on blue a silver wavy bar, above it a serpent, below a silver dove armed red. The motto runs: clever as the serpent, steady as the river, peaceful as the dove.
Sources: Degener Verlag, Deutsches Familienarchiv vol. 160 »von Gerlach – Lebensbilder einer Familie« (in German); Wikipedia articles on the families named; Wikimedia Commons (coat-of-arms images). Given to the best of our knowledge. Jürgen von Gerlach: von Gerlach. Lebensbilder einer Familie in sechs Jahrhunderten (Deutsches Familienarchiv 160), Insingen 2015 (in German). All sources. For corrections or additions, please contact the family administration.