The paternal
name can be traced by direct descent to the city of Stavenhagen in the state of Mecklenburg, Germany. The first citizen so surnamed to appear in the archives was recorded in 1518, a tradesman Nikolaus, who was thrown out of town for starting an uprising. Ah, yes.
A hurricane washed one of Lee's grandfathers (born 1844 in Charlottenburg) up on Galveston beach in 1860 to found our branch of the island clan. Grandpa and Lee's father rode out the historic September 1900 storm (and you think Katrina was bad) high on one of the city's few surviving masonry buildings.
(Well, Ike just missed updating the 108th anniversary of this story by four days. A nephew, who in true born-on-the-island style rode it out, reports this subtropical, once subparadisal harbor now is "like a ghost town.")
Cindy, born in Oklahoma, has anatomy proving that some of her pilgrim fathers walked to the Americas, dating her pedigree in the New World as at least twenty times older than Lee's. The Stavenhagen family crypt in the Marienkirche at
Anklam was razed in 1936 to make space for a new furnace.
Index of Stavenhagen.net:
Cogito. ET TU, AMICE?Gottfried von Strassburg: Tristan (Middle High German, ~1210). The first entire verse and structural conversion into English (or any other language) of this intricate classic, with a new literary evaluation.
How to Teach English in China: Try it. They need you.
Lord and Lady, Monk and Merchant, Devil, Saint, and Thief: Stories moral and immoral from the Late Middle Ages, translated from Middle High German.
A Little Light Musing: A serial Parade of Prejudices with citations to Authoritative Sources.