Lebrecht (von) Gerlach

1669 – 1742

Councillor at the Köslin Court of Justice · founder of the Prussian line

Estate: No estate of his own (Köslin)

Lebrecht (von) Gerlach, born in 1669, served as a councillor at the Court of Justice in Köslin, Hinterpommern. Before him the family had lived for generations in Nienburg on the Saale and, earlier still, in Melsungen in Hesse, without noble rank. With his wife Lucia, née am Ende, daughter of Philipp Arnold am Ende, he had several children, among them the future Privy Councillor of Finance Friedrich Wilhelm von Gerlach. On 2 September 1735 Lebrecht Gerlach received the Prussian recognition and renewal of hereditary noble status – the start of the Pomeranian, Prussian line of the von Gerlach family and, at the same time, the best-documented era of its history. He died in Köslin in 1742.

Chronicle

um 1669
Born; the family originates from Nienburg on the Saale (Anhalt).
13. Mai 1698
Where he came from can be read off a single day. In his history of the principality of Anhalt, Beckmann names the officials who served at the hereditary homage to Prince Leopold at Dessau. Two of those names recur in this family: the chamber clerk was a Herr Gerlach, and the privy councillor before whom the oath was sworn was called von Raumer. The twenty-nine-year-old left Anhalt not long afterwards, and we know where he went. Whom the chronicler meant we do not know. The one certainty is that both names stood in the same chancery on that day in May – three generations before a marriage brought them together.
vor 1735
Appointed councillor at the Köslin Court of Justice in Hinterpommern.
vor 1735
The marriage to Lucia am Ende produces several children; the eldest known son is the later Privy Senior Finance Councillor Friedrich Wilhelm.
1735
Prussian recognition and renewal of hereditary noble status (2 September).
1742
Dies in Köslin.
1884–1886
A good hundred and forty years after his death a monthly on the name appeared from C. A. Starke at Görlitz: "Haus Gerlach. A monthly for the advancement of the history of the Görlitz family and other families of this name", edited by G. Gerlach of Weissenhöhe in the province of Posen. The January number of 1885 carried the "pedigree of the court councillor Lebrecht von Gerlach of Coeslin, 1682–1792", the February number a transcript of a 1541 grant of arms and a correction to the "Genealogia Gerlachiana". The paper did not outlast a single volume. Copies survive at Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, Stuttgart and Bamberg (German union catalogue of serials, 1443434-9).
Was 1891 erzählt wurde
The introduction to the general’s memoirs names him differently: "Leberecht von Gerlach, born 1670, was Landrat and mayor of Köslin." The office at the court of justice is documented; a Köslin mayoralty is not. The same introduction dates the family’s entry into the Pomeranian knighthood "since 1733 by the purchase of larger landed property" – two years before the Prussian renewal of nobility and two decades before his son’s purchases. Both are nineteenth-century family tradition, not charter evidence.
Kinder
Fifteen children – seven sons and eight daughters. Four daughters married: a von Grape, Captain von Wolden, the Danish captain von Brämer and a von Pogrell. Of the sons only three reached an older age: Friedrich Wilhelm, Martin and Otto Leberecht (family history, 1903). The finding aid of the family archive names two further persons of this generation: Martin von Gerlach (1716–1760) and Sophia Hedewig von Gerlach. They stand in the "III. Familien-Nachrichten" of 1755 to 1764 and in the file on the Pomeranian estates beside Friedrich Wilhelm (1711–1780) and Otto Lebrecht (b. 1719). For Martin the brotherhood is documented: the county description of the Kolberg-Körlin district records that his widow and his sister made over Ganzkow on 18 July 1764 to "his brother, the war and domains councillor Friedrich v. Gerlach". Sophia Hedewig may be the sister named there; that is not certain.
Woher seine Frau kam
Lucia am Ende, whom he married around 1700, came from a Bremen family of physicians. Her great-grandfather Valentin am Ende was born at Hainichen on 15 January 1575 and was in 1612 body physician to the archbishop of Bremen; his son Arnold practised as a doctor in Bremen, and her father Philipp Arnold, born on 6 October 1654, was physician to the city and a count palatine besides. On 10 November 1678 he had married Lucia von Line; ten children followed. One of them took the same road as his sister: her brother Arnold became intendant at Lauenburg and died in 1716 at Stolp, not eighty kilometres from Köslin. The Bremen line was published by Percy Ernst Schramm in 1961, expressly as a section from the ancestral list of this family.

Sources and literature