Wolfgang Dreuse, a Bus’d’ker (a term we’ll use here to describe the family of surnames that includes our own) descendant and creator of a site on the Buer area and families, reported meeting another German researcher, Friedrich Hensiek, who has references to the Bußdiecker farm from 1500 to 1630.
Friedrich is descended from Johann Heinrich Bussdieker, son of Johann Adam Buschdiecker, grandson of Ernst Heinrich Buschdiecker, and great-grandson of Johann Ernst Heinrich Buschdiecker. Descendants of Johann Heinrich were not known to us before this report.
The references are from tax records and census reports. Those old records do not give the names of any ancestors earlier than the ones we already knew, but they do tell us that the farm existed around the time that the Americas began to be settled by Europeans, and say a little bit about the residents. Wolfgang has a copy of the earliest record that says, “AD 1500, to den Buschdike, head, wife and 4 people”.
Early History
The first Bus’d’kers for whom we have a continuous line of descendants are Anton Caspar Bußdiecker and Cath. Engel Türls. The “ß” is a ligature, or typesetting combination, that represents the letters “ss”. Anton was born in 1713, nearly three centuries ago. He and Cath. (probably Catherine) were married in 1734 and lived in a place called “Am Bussdieck” near the town of Buer (pronounced BOO-er), a few miles east of Osnabrück.
You can see where it is located and learn something about the area, and see the exact location of the family farm by going to the maps page.
Other towns in the area which are mentioned in the family history are Melle (sister city of New Melle, Missouri), and Sehlingdorf. That area is in the state of Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony), whose capital is Hannover, in the northern part of Germany. Those places used to be part of the Kingdom of Hanover. Some of our ancestors said that they came from “Hanover” (the kingdom), which some descendants mistakenly thought meant the city of Hannover.
Emigration to the United States
When the Bus’d’kers came to the United States, they settled in two widely separated areas. Hermann Heinrich and his children settled in the area around Woodville, Pemberville, and Luckey east of Toledo, Ohio. Johann Ernst and his children apparently came up the Mississippi River and settled in the area around New Melle and St. Charles, Missouri, just north and west of St. Louis. Today those two areas have the largest concentrations of Bus’d’kers, although we are now spread all over the United States. Descendants in Germany today seem to be concentrated in or or around Buer, Melle and Osnabrück.
If you are a Bus’d’ker and are not listed on our family tree, contact us here with enough information to connect you into the tree. If you do not have that information, send what you do have and we’ll try to find the connection. Our information is drawn primarily from the research done by Roy F. Busdiecker, Jr. who started with next to nothing, and has made impressive progress through networking with other researchers.
If you can add to the story, we’d like to hear from you!