Hutstein Origins

Hutstein Origins

 

 

 

Hutstein Origins is dedicated to the worldwide Hutstein – Huthstein – Hutsteiner – Huthsteiner families and a research platform to find their origins, ancestors and descendants

During the first steps in researching the family origins I found that there had been 3 main locations of Hutsteiner in greater Germany and additionally in the USA. Only after several years I found out that all families had the identical origin: the hamlet of Hutstein in Upper Austria close to the Bavarian border.

It is important to say, the all Hutsteiner family members have their origin in one of two farms in Hutstein, Upper Austria, but it does not implicate that the are related to each other. In fact, I’m convinced they are not.

Nevertheless I divided the families according their major regional occurrences in family members of Austria/Bavaria, Westfalen/Hesse and Saxony. And finally the US branch.

A brief history of the Hutsteiner family

A brief history of the Hutsteiner family

The Hutstein was first mentioned in documents in 1509 when Tameln (=Thomas) paid taxes to the Rannariedl lordship on Huestain from one fief. Over time, this became a small hamlet close to the Hutstein rock and known as hamlet Hutstein, with a farm belonging to the Rannariedl dominion and another farm belonging to the Falkenstein dominion and much later with some additional houses.

I.2 Once upon a time frame | HUTSTEIN Origins

Obviously the ancestry of the Hutsteiner families can now be traced back to the inhabitants of this hamlet, which apparently belonged to the parish of Pfarrkirchen im Mühlviertel and is located just across the border in Upper Austria.

I.3 One single origin | HUTSTEIN Origins

map of Hutstein

Interestingly, the hamlet of Hutstein had two fiefs, the first of which was under the rule of Rannariedl from 1509, the second to the rule of Falkenstein, which was documented from 1537. Both fiefdoms were of the same size. Likely the first fiefdom was not divided as both were subject to different lords. We can assume that two different families sat on these two fiefdoms, whose descendants later received the surname Hutsteiner, but possibly no direct family relationship existed.

The first explicit documentary recording of the family name Hutsteiner took place in 1544 when Lienhard Huetstainer asked for permission to build a mill on the Osterbach near Messnerschlag. This Lienhard occurred in 1560 in a dispute with the millers of Wegscheid. The next Hutsteiner is mentioned in 1581 when a tax document from Rannariedl recorded  Steffan Hutsteiner, the successor of Georg.

The Hutsteiner family name finally established at the beginning of the 17th century. Before that the name appears very rarely in the existing documents, although many other family names have already been used, so that we have to assume that a stroke of luck in history has made the name survive the times.

Nevertheless, the Hutsteiner families continued to expand in the Mühlviertel / Upper Austria and Lower Bavaria / Hochstift Passau areas by the middle of the 17th century.

Another important record of the family name took place on September 1st, 1644, as Ferdinand Herberstain, priest of  Soc. Jesu and Rector of the Imperial College of Linz, landlord of the Ottensheim dominion, gave Andreas Huetstainer, citizen and provost of Pfarrkirchen, various tithes in Pfarrkirchen and Sarleinsbach parish as fiefs, and notarized a certain social rise of an Hutsteiner.

Meanwhile, one Hutsteiner left the region and moved to Saxonia, likely due to religious persecution.

From 1638, a Michael Huetstainer appears in the court files of the Wiesenburg office in Saxony and from 1641 in the protestant parish registers of Kirchberg near Zwickau in Saxony, who certainly immigrated in Hartmannsdorf near Kirchberg, as there were no further entries in the court books of any Hutsteiners in this area recorded before 1638. Likely he was the Michael Hutsteiner mentioned 1626 in Hofkirchen i.M., Upper Austria. 

IV.1.3 An Exulant | HUTSTEIN Origins

If you take a closer look at the history of this village of Hartmannsdorf, it is noticeable that around 1633 it was almost extinct due to the pest plague. It was reported that total of 8 families had survived only. During this period, protestants were also expelled from the Habsburg lands, who were accepted by the Elector in Saxony and settled around the Ore Mountains. Unfortunately, it has not yet been possible to find this direct connection to Upper Austria, especially because the Kirchberg church records are under lock still.

But there is a certain probability because Michael Hutsteiner is sometimes called “Huet” or “Huettenstainer” in Saxony, which was the original name of Hutsteiner in the land of the Rannariedl and Falkenstein dominions and etymologically indicates an ancestry from the Bavarian-speaking area. As he is also referred to as Huettenstainer, which may specifically refer to the name of the hamlet Huettenstain (Hutstein) in the Urbar of Falkenstein from 1607. In addition, in Upper Austria (e.g. in Freistadt) protestant priests from Saxony were active as missionaries in the decades before the expulsion.

Looking at the available court documents from Wiesenburg, it is noticeable that Michael Hutsteiner, a shoemaker, made several purchases around 1640, which suggests a certain level of prosperity. This in turn also matches the copies from Freistadt, the only town in the Mühlviertel and the region where our hamlet Hutstein is located, that apparently many better-off residents left the country with the first wave of displaced persons.

It remains to be mentioned that already processed files in Saxony nowadays contain a note about Michael Hutsteiner that his first wedding was in 1615. The origin of this information could not yet be determined, but is probably in the court documents, e.g. as a birth letter of one of his descendants or any guild letter.

The great-grandson of Michael Hutsteiner, who immigrated to Saxony – also Michael – later came to Dillenburg, Hessen-Nassau, around 1734. Likely he came along with his uncle Georg Hutsteiner to neighbouring city Wetzlar, where he obviously learned his profession healer from him. Since Georg probably had some ties to the military and the court in Dresden, he must have been sent to Hessen as a support for the saxonian delegates in Wetzlar at the Imperial chamber court.

A few years later his uncle Christian was stationed with the Saxon army in Warsaw, where he was promoted to the Saxon travel cashier. From 1763, when Saxony had to give up royal dignity in Poland, he returned and founded a family from which a well-known artillery colonel, Christian Heinrich v. Huthsteiner, emerged, who fought first for and later against Napoleon.

Back to Michael Hutsteiner in Dillenburg: he became the ancestor of most of the protestant Huthsteiners still known today – often spelled with ‘th’ from then on – in Hessen-Nassau and neighbouring areas and of most of the Hut(h)steiner families living in the USA today.

III.2.1 From Saxony to Hesse | HUTSTEIN Origins

It is important to list other Hutstein families whose ancestry has not yet been clarified: from 1713 on, this includes a family of Johann Adam Hutstein, who had descendants in the Bad Schwalbach region and their occupation often were shepherds and of catholic religion. Presumably he is a descendant of Carl Hutsteiner from Budweis, son of Vitus Hutsteiner, who appeared around 1670 in Martinsthal, Rheingau. All of the following families appear in the vicinity north of Marthinsthal, which means that a coincidence probably can be ruled out. However, there is still no written evidence of these descendants.

In addition, there was at least one family in Geldern around 1634, in the neighbourhood of the Netherlands, in which a Hutstein family can also be found. It can be assumed, however, that this family, like the Jewish families of same name, either got the surname independently or, most likely, got this name by chance due to a spelling mistake in the records, perhaps derived from “Utstein”. Perhaps further research will show whether there are any connections to the extended family from the Upper Austrian Mühlviertel.

As a final result it can be stated today that all – except the Jewish Hutstein families – have their origin in this small hamlet of Hutstein in Upper Austria founded between 1488 and 1509.

Families

Families

All our family members can trace their origin back to the hamlet Hutstein in Upper Austria, very close to the Bavarian border and the town of Wegscheid.

II.2.1 Hamlet Hutstein | HUTSTEIN Origins

the hamlet of Hutstein in Upper Austria

Over time there had been formed six major family lines at three specific areas in Germany:

  • in Saxony
  • in Westphalia/Hesse-Nassau
  • in Bavaria/Austria 

Some of the families disappeared over time, e.g. all saxonian families.

Occurrences of Hutsteiner family members

 

I. General

I. General

Our family surname obviously originated in the vicinity of the hamlet Hutstein in Upper Austria, close to the border to Bavaria, town Wegscheid.

hamlet Hutstein

A ‘Hutstein’ or ‘Hutestein’  in former times had been a landmark for pasture areas. It is derived from the german words ‘hüten’ which means ‘to guard’. And ‘-stein’, in English ‘stone’ or ‘rock’.

But here we are not talking about small stones to show the pasture areas’ or region’s border, but natural monuments like large rocks or even hills which ‘guard’ the surrounding region or have been land and border marks.

Another important root: “Huthe”, likely a word of the old bavarian language (old central bavarian language spoken in south Bavaria and most parts of Austria before the 1400s), does mean “stony field”, which would fit with the fields of the Hutstein hamlet in Austria, where a lot of stones can be found. But this word should be much older as the Hutstein hamlet, which was founded only after the year 1488, so likely this does not apply here, especially as we have the natural monument Hutstein close to the Hamlet.

our Hutstein rock

‘Hut’ does have also the meaning ‘hat’, so any rock which seemed to have a ‘hat’ on could have become a ‘Hutstein’,  translated as ‘hat-stone’, too, which likely does not apply here either.

So, people settling close to such a ‘Hutstein’ eventually had been called ‘Hutsteiner’. This can been seen very clearly for the Hutsteiner families in Bavaria/Austria as the small hamlet of ‘Hutstein’ is  still existing close to this ‘Hutstein’ rock hidden in the forest nearby. It is necessary to mention that not at all known ‘Hutstein’ locations in Germany generated the surname ‘Hutsteiner’, i.e. there are much more ‘Hutstein’-rocks existing but obviously only one location where our surname popped up: in Bavaria/Austria region.

Hutstein – small artificial border mark stone

Hutstein – natural monument close to Haugschlag, Austria

As the Hutstein region in Bavaria/Austria has been a border region for long time (i.e. former border between the territory of Passau and the dominions of Rannariedl and Falkenstein) at that time and nowadays, the name likely is derived from a border mark, the Hutstein, which is only 300 m in distance from the border defined by the Osterbach creek.

Furthermore, there are two very well known major ‘Hutstein’- hills/rocks, but nearby I could not find any ‘Hutsteiner’ surname popping up in old documents:

  • close to city of Glatz, now Klodzko (Poland)
  • close to Haugschlag, Austria, at the Czech border.

All occurrences of our family name in US, UK, France, Netherlands, Australia… are descendants of the mentioned three major family lines.

Beside these, there are also two jewish lines of Hutsteins coming from Kolomea, Ukraine, and Suwalki, Poland, but I assume that transliteration issues are responsible for our surname there, i.e. a Cyrillic name ‘Gutstein’ or ‘Ghutsztejn’, a quite common jewish name, became in western world ‘Hutstein’. A origin of these jewish families could not be found until now.

As mentioned above in English ‘Hutstein’ could be translated as ‘Hat-stone’, the pronounciation is like ‘Hood:stine’ resp. ‘Hood:stiner’.

Due to pronounciation some immigrants to the US obviously changed their names to ‘Hootstein’, ‘Hootstine’ and ‘Hutstine’ to adopt to English language.

But there is also existing the german surname ‘Hatstein’ resp. ‘Hatsteiner’ which would fit to the English pronounciation ‘Hut:stine’ resp. ‘Hut:stiner’, but is not related to our families at all.

Hutstein, Huthstein, Huthstain, Huthsteiner, Hutsteiner, Huttsteiner… and some more variations were treated in the past as identical. Therefore the same person once was called ‘Hutsteiner’ while in another document he/she appeared as ‘Hutstein’. This happened in all three major families.

Very often I observed type mismatches especially with Hulstein, Holstein, Utstein, Gutstein, Hertstein, Hatstein and some others.

Also it happens that people not used to the name Hutstein are mixing it up with ‘HuFstein’. Don’t know why, because existence  of surname ‘Hufstein’ is extremely rare, but it happened quite often to me and my relatives.

I.1 Once upon a time

I.1 Once upon a time

At the location Hutstein two dominions, Rannariedl and Falkenstein, had given away a fief. It is important to know that both Rannariedl and Falkenstein originally belonged to one single aristocrat family, the counts of Falkenstein. Therefore, both, Rannariedl and Falkenstein, had fiefs in the same villages and locations as the territory was equally divided when the Falkensteiner had to pledge Rannariedl in 1301 for the first time. 

castle Rannariedl
castle Falkenstein

That’s the primary reason why Rannariedl as well Falkenstein had both a fief at Hutstein.

Acc. to the Urbar of Rannariedl and Falkenstein these two fiefs had same size. Therefore we can assume the location of both fiefs on a cadastre map of 1860:

both farms seen on a cadastre map of approx. 1850

As the road to these fiefs directly leads to the southern one it is likely that this one was the first granted at Hutstein and belonged to the Rannariedl dominion. 

Rannariedl’s Hutstein fief

While in the Urbar of Rannariedl of 1488 no place ‘Huestain’ or similar was recorded or could be identified,  in 1509 there was Tameln (Thomas) in Huestain (Hutstein) acc. to the available second Urbar of the dominion Rannariedl. It seems that between 1488 and 1509 the forest was cleared at this location and a fief was erected. 

the very first Hutstein record (right page, middle entry: Huestain)

Thomas Hutsteiner is mentioned in another tax document of the dominion of Rannariedl from 1509, too:

Thamel (Hutsteiner) donated imperial tax 1509

In 1613 the fief was still mentioned in church balance records of Pfarrkirchen i.M.  as “Themel”, i.e. Themel=Thomas. The given name of the very first inhabitant of this farm was used as the farm name.

Themel at the Hutstein 1613 – from church balance sheet: “Dem Themel ak Huedstain… 200 (Gulden)”

Shortly after Thomas followed Anderl (=Andreas) on the Rannariedl’s Hutstein fief.   

from Urbar beginning 16th century: “Huetstain  Andel dass ein Lehen dint … Air Käß Hennen”

Andreas then was followed by Jörg (=Georg).

from Urbar mid 16th century: “Huetstain Jörg saselbst dient  … Käs  Air Henn”

Unfortunately  for both urbars there is no exact date of recording mentioned. Therefore it is  necessary to estimate their emergence. As the first one seems more advanced than the Urbar of 1509  but has most of the time same inhabitants as in 1509, it likely was set up shortly after 1509, i.e. Andre followed Tameln at the Hutstein fief. 

And as the next one obviously was based on the template of the urbar before likely Jörg (Georg) followed Andre by mid of the 16th century.

Then, in 1570 Steffan Hutsteiner was registered on the Rannariedl fief at Hutstein within the parish of Pfarrkirchen im Mühlviertel.

Steffan Hutsteiner 1570

In 1581 in dominion Rannariedl Steffan Hutsteiner was registered at the Hutstein again:

Steffan Hutsteiner 1581 in the Urbar of dominion Rannariedl

Steffan is again mentioned in a tax document from Rannariedl of 1581:

Steffan Hutsteiner tax document 1581

A Steffan Hutsteiner, born around 1536, was later mentioned again in court records of 1606 in the dominion Altenhof (=parts of Rannariedl + Falkenstein): Probably he is identical to the Steffan mentioned above, but moved away from Hutstein.

Altenhof court record of 13.2.1606 mentioning Steffan Hutsteiner in Höfl

Another tax document from 1581 mentions Hans who paid tax at the Hutstein:

tax document of Rannariedl 1581

Rannariedl’s fief at Hutstein probably changed its owner around the 1580s as Hanns Aumülner was recorded to pay tax there on 18th January 1591. Likely he is identical with the above mentioned Hanns, i.e. no “original” Hutsteiner anymore at least since 1581.

1581 Hans Aumueller paid tax from the Theml Hutsteiner farm

It is interesting that a Hans Aumuellner occured in Altenhof court records a clerk (Amtmann) of the dominion Hochhaus from 1606 on.

Meanwhile, Michael Hutsteiner occurred in a document of dominion Rannariedl 1590, but his location was not given:

Rambrecht 1590
description of parts of Rannariedl’s dominion 1590 

In 1600 Wolfgang Stölzl (Hutsteiner) from Hutstein paid for candles at the church of Pfarrkirchen and later he was mentioned in a tax document of 1623 and 1626 in court records of Altenhof. As Wolfgang died before 1627 probably  his son Wolfgang followed him as owner of the farm, may be longer time before.

Wolf-Hutsteiner-Urbar-1623-Einlag-Altenhof
court record of Wolfgang Stoelzl

After Wolfgang Stölzl, who was in extreme depths in 1629, Paul Grubauer obviously bought and took over the fief followed by his son and grand son.

Falkenstein’s Hutstein fief

The second urbar of Rannariedl dated to the beginning of the 16th century mentions that the community of Kafring, a village nearby, may hunt at the Hutstein on half of the clearing. I.e. the second Hutstein fief belonging to the Falkenstein dominion was already existing at that time, too.   

part of the Rannariedl urbar beginning 16th century

In 1537 the Urbar of dominion Falkenstein mentioned Hans Hutsteiner at the Hutstein (Huetterstain)

Falkenstein Urbar 1537

In 1562 the farm at Hutstein was inhabited by Hannsl (Johann) Hutsteiner, perhaps the Hannsl above. The location was noted as Huetstain.

Hutstein: Urbar Falkenstein 1562

In 1570 the Hutstein-farm was owned by Bangraz (Pankratz) Hutsteiner, but it is not known, whether he was a son of Johann above. The location was recorded as Huettenstain.

 
Hutstein: Urbar Falkenstein 1570

Pankratz (Pongratz) was again recorded in 1607. The Urbar mentions Pongratz (Pankratz) Hutsteiner as farmer there. 

Hutstein: Urbar Falkenstein 1607

An additional tax documents shows us that Pankratz paid his tax from 1607 until 1612 there:

Hutstein: Urbar Falkenstein 1607

Pangratz Hutsteiner was followed by Zacharias Hutsteiner.

Around 1600 the dominion Rannariedl and the dominion Falkenstein were re-united under the reign of count Heinrich Salburger.

While surnames established during the 16th century and most of the underlings in 1581’s Urbar were named by their surname, it is necessary to mention that the surname Hutsteiner (Huetstainer) popped up within the dominion of Rannariedl and Falkenstein, the Hutsteiner origin, very rarely before 1600. This emphasizes that the location and its name and family name was established only short time before, i.e. approximately around 1509.

Lienhard Hutsteiner who erected the Hutsteiner mill in 1543 was the first documented person with the surname Hutsteiner. Probably he was a direct descendant of Tameln or Hannsl at Hutstein. 

So, we had two family lines at Hutstein: the first one started with Tameln (Thomas) Hutsteiner around 1509 in Rannariedl dominion and ended around 1581 with Steffan Hutsteiner, the second one started with Hannsl (Johann) Hutsteiner around 1537 in Falkenstein dominion and probably ended around 1670 with Zacharias Hutsteiner. 

Whether Hannsl was a descendant of Tameln or from another family probably never will be clarified, but as the second fief was within another dominion likely it was another family. Also it is not defined whether succeeding farmers on the two different fiefs had been descendants of the former farmer, i.e. it is not clear whether e.g. Pongratz was a son of Bangratz and so on.

follow up of inhabitants

 

Anyhow, it seems that the survival of the surname Hutsteiner was not guaranteed for at least a century and should be regarded as a lucky coincidence.