Have you ever come across old family records that mention Prussia? Did you try to find it on a map? Unless you look at maps from the late 1700s up until the end of World War II you will find no trace of it now. Have you wondered what is the history of Prussia and what happened to it? We will not go into great detail in this blog but we will give you some of the highlights. Prussia, like many places in history, comes about because whoever has the most power gets the land.
Pagan tribes lived on lands between Pomerania and Lithuania.
Pagan tribes in the Middle Ages that lived on the lands between Pomerania and Lithuania adjoining the Baltic Sea. This is where the name “Prussia” originated. These tribes were conquered in the 1200s by the Roman Catholic Church and became a fiefdom of Poland. Over the next few centuries the Knights grand masters ruled over the land. When Albert I of the Hohenzollern family became the grand masters, he became a Lutheran and was the first major ruler to break from the Catholic Church during the reformation.
Prussia became a kingdom in 1701.
After slowly acquiring more land over the next couple of centuries, Prussia was finally named a kingdom in 1701 and then started the Hohenzollern family's crusade to join all their land as one and to conquer everything in their way. This eventually wiped Poland off the map for 100 years. During the 1800s Prussia dominated over smaller and weaker states. They annexed Hanover and Hess, and they were the winners of the Franco-Prussian war. They declared a Second German Empire. The king then became the emperor. While Prussia included a lot of German states, it was not considered German. It was considered the predecessor of the unified German states.
After WWI the empire was dissolved.
So what happened to Prussia? After the German Empire was defeated in World War I the empire was dissolved. Though Prussia remained a state of the interwar Weimar Republic. After World War II Prussia was officially wiped off European maps. However, if you are looking for Prussian ancestry records you would look in the same places as your German ancestry records.
While this is merely a fraction of the history it gives you a starting point of why in some records your ancestors may have been called Prussians or said they were from Prussia. It is many centuries of history to shuffle through, and it is very interesting to see all the changes and which ones were welcomed and which were not. Maybe with this information you can find where your ancestors lived and when they may have been incorporated into the Prussian Kingdom.
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