I have covered Gütersloh as the home of one of my four railway families, but looking at it again for the lost cities series, I realised that beyond that railway family, some lineages are actually indigenous to the villages that now form the inner city of Gütersloh as far back as records last (ca 1620), ie long before before the village became a town in 1825.
Gütersloh grew rapidly in the 19th century, mainly thanks to its key position on the Cologne to Minden railway line now served by the RE6 (it is thus one of the six lost cities to which I can take a direct regional express train from Düsseldorf-Bilk where I'm based when I'm in Germany). The station opened in 1847. Businesses including Bertelsmann (publishing) and Miele (domestic appliances) chose the quiet but well-connected town for their operations. Nevertheless, in the absence of heavy industries, it didn't grow as big as the cities in the western parts of today's NRW. It only reached the 100,000 threshold in 2018, officially becoming a Großstadt, making it the third major city in the Ostwestfalen region (after Bielefeld and Paderborn).
Not many postcards of the town around, but you can see the village heritage on this one (and I already shared one with the railway station here).
Source.
What happened: Direct ancestors with family names like Cosfeld (Kosfeld, Coesfeld), Güthenke or Goldbecker were resident in the village of Gütersloh in the 17th century. I am particularly excited about the name Güthenke as it looks like it might be linked to the origins of the village name, so that is like an ultimate root for a name line. The earliest in that line, Hinrich Güthenke was born before 1620 at Blankenhagen 33, Gütersloh (Blankenhagen being a village that merged into the town in 1910).
Around the time when the village became a town, Christoph Heinrich Cosfeld (* ca. 1801 Gütersloh) married Clara Dorothea Güthenke (* ca. 1803 Gütersloh).
On 12.11.1851 their son Friedrich Wilhelm Cosfeld, who worked as a cooper in Gütersloh married Catherine Elisabeth Obelode from Steinhagen. Her family name is a one-off linked to farm called Ubbelohde near Bielefeld, and her ancestry is very well documented. There is a wild story suggesting she may have a French refugee in her family tree.
Their daughter Johanna Catherina Charlotte Cosfeld married the railway worker Johann Anton Lütkemeyer from Schwaney, who died in 1887 aged only 44, of tuberculosis. Charlotte married again, but she was still resident at Gütersloh at the marriage of her daughter Luise Lütkemeyer in 1902, so I'm assuming she stayed there until her death in 1928. One of Luise's sisters also stayed in Gütersloh, so we still had relatives there as late as the 1950s, but I don't know what became of them. My mother recalled a cousin of her mother called Clara Gold who ran a small shop there in the 50s, that is all I know.
So our official dates are now: 1825-1928/1950s.
Previously in the #lostcities series:
- Elberfeld / Wuppertal 1919 - 1961
- Strasbourg 1901 - 1908
- Minden 1903 - 1952/ca.1970
- Tangermünde 1888 - 1916
- Rheydt 1923 - 1935
- Königsberg 1935 - 1945
- Aachen 1936 - 1940
- Idar-Oberstein 1940 - 1962
- Bad Nauheim 1945 - 1972/1983
- Würzburg 1961 - 1968
- Hamborn inlaws: 1922 - 1979/2015
- Bonn 1929-1934
- Lorsch 1890-1938/1973
- Krefeld 1764 - 1924/present
NB I have now added a second end date to the cities where other family members stayed on after the direct ancestors died. So far, that is the case for Minden, Bad Nauheim and Hamborn.
The Mastodon thread for season 2 starts here.
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