Lippische Ziegler
In the 19th century, up to 40% of all male workers left the Principality of Lippe every spring. Until the autumn they were working on brickworks in the north of Germany, in the Netherlands, in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. The seasonal migration of the Lippe Ziegler goes back to the 17th century.
The administration of the Principality of Lippe registered them in detail. For the years from 1778 to 1869 there are more than 100,000 data records on more than 30,000 pullers in the State Archives of North Rhine-Westphalia (LAV NRW), Department Ostwestfalen-Lippe, in Detmold. Nowhere else in the world can you find so much and dense information on seasonal workers of origin and destination for such a long and early time on that scale. They are invaluable for the history of migrations, work and the family, but also for genealogists with ancestors from Lippe.
Thanks to the cooperation between the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam (IISG) and the LAV NRW, this data is embedded in its historical context.
The historical documents are offered in this portal in three forms:
- As digitized copies of the archives, in many cases provided with a transcription
- In information about the individual source groups
- As a database, in which the personal names from the passport and brick layer lists are stored in such a way that they can easily be searched by name, place of origin in Lippe and destination. From the database, there are direct links to the digitized objects to check the transcription
We recommend that researchers who are interested in names always start researching the portal with a search in the database.
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