The Rönnefarth / Rönnefahrt Family
Coat of arms, poem and family gatherings of the Rönnefahrts
I can trace the Rönnefarth / Rennefarth family back at least 400 years in the villages of Tarmow and Hakenberg. At first the family split into two branches, and over time the tree branched out further still. In later generations, for example, there's a baker's branch, a hereditary-reeve's branch, and a tenant-farmer's branch.
I compared my existing Rönnefahrt data with that of a fellow Rönnefahrt researcher. His information comes from a book on the history of the villages of Tarmow and Hakenberg, written by a Mr Heinz Hugo for his doctoral thesis on the region. In that work, he also covered the history of the Rönnefarth family in broad strokes. The book was written around 1940. The author, Heinz Hugo, also took part in the various regular Rönnefahrt family gatherings. These gatherings were documented in the Rönnefarths' (or Rönnefahrts', Rennefarths', Rennefahrts') family newsletter. That newsletter, "Das Ahnenerbe" ("The Ancestral Heritage"), contains family-history reports, and I own several accounts of these gatherings myself. My data lines up remarkably well with his, so I can be fairly confident that Martin I Rönnefahrt is our earliest known ancestor to date. Heinz Hugo's book is held at Göttingen University Library.
On the Rönnefahrt Family Gatherings
In 1934, the "Niederlausitzer Anzeiger" newspaper published a special feature on the Rönnefahrts' family day, written by Mr Heinz Hugo. He describes his impressions of the gathering and offers a small glimpse into our ancestors' history. The Liebrenz family kindly sent me a copy; since parts of it were hard to read, I transcribed the text as accurately as I could, though I can't guarantee 100% accuracy. Click the image alongside to open the PDF file (226KB).
Origin of the Name Rönnefarth / Rönnefahrt
The original text on the meaning of the name, from the report on the 5th family day (Ahnenerbe)
"Mr v. Görtzke then spoke on the interpretation of the name; after some interesting general remarks on the origin and types of our family names, he laid out his view of our name: as mentioned earlier (see p. 9 of the "Ahnenerbe"), he traces it — unlike most name dictionaries — not to the old German personal name Raginfried, but to a ferry right ("Fähr-Gerechtsame") over the Rhin river (the oldest forms of the name being Rennefahrt, Rinnefurth and Ronnevart). Given that our clan only received its name in its Bellin homeland, this would also prove that it had already been settled there since the German colonisation of the 12th and 13th centuries."
A Note on the Ferry Right
A "Fähr-Gerechtsame" was a right, granted since the Middle Ages, to charge fees for ferrying people or goods across a river. (Source: Wikipedia.de)
A Poem on the Name Rönnefarth
Rönnefarth — a Poem
since settlers came from the Lower Rhine somehow.
They settled down in the little land of Bellin,
to cultivate the marsh along the Rhin.
They built their houses, they made their land their own,
ploughed and planted with hands hard as stone,
and one of them built his house to stand
on the bank of the Rhin, out toward Tarmow's land.
Where the ford ran through the river's flow,
that is where the family's name did grow:
The Rinnefurters — The Rennefahrts
Author unknown. The poem and coat of arms were kindly provided to us by the Liebrenz family.
The Rönnefarth Family Coat of Arms
Our coat of arms bears two buffalo horns. I assume the emblem within the coat of arms represents a pair of "cloth-maker's shears."
Humankind is rooted in its ancestors, but all things have their roots in heaven.(Chinese proverb)