Zarnekla, Kreis Demmin, Pommern
Descendants of Christoffer Matthis Leverentz
family lived at the manorial farm at Zarnekla and Sassan. It is the earliest Pommern village associated with the Poll and Leverentz families later of Danville, IL and Gillett, AR. Click here for extensive details on this family.Zarnekla was originally a manorial village and the estate house (gut) and the manorial barns still exist. It has now been broken up into small farms. Here are pictures of the gut, barns and village:
Sassan was their parish church.
Johannes Soeder, a genealogist working in Pommern, provided this detail on the village:
Zarnekla is a very old settlement site. The villages name has Slavic roots and is composed from ЧЁРНЫЙ /tschjornui/ (black) and ГОЛОВА /golowa/ (head). One meaning is that Zarnekla was a settlement of charcoal burners, men with black heads or faces from his work. Another meaning was that Zarnekla was a sanctuary or cult place to veneration for a (wooden) God with a black head called Tjarnaglofi. Probably both are right. The God Tjarnaglofi is the God of victory with relation to weapons and maybe to fire. Wood charcoal - the product of the charcoal burners - was used to make iron tools and weapons from bog iron. Places for smelting of bog iron were in Loitz and in Rustow which lies behind the oak-beech wood in south of Zarnekla.
The geographical position of Zarnekla is determined by the Ibitz-creek, a glacial valley from the last ice age. The village Zarnekla is located in the south bank of the Ibitz-creek while the church village Gülzow is located in the north bank of the Ibitz creek. Zarnekla has an elevation of about 1250 meters.
Zarnekla was part of the Gülzow parish since medieval times and today also. From1242 up to the end of the Thirty-years-war, the village was property of the city of Loitz. Then the village became part of the governance of the Earl of Küssow.
When (Northwest-) Pomerania changed from the Swedish Kingdom to Prussia in 1815, Zarnekla became an autonomous community in the county Grimmen. Today Zarnekla is a village of the community Düvier, county Demmin.
The first mention of Zarnekla is in the document establishing the city of Loitz in 1242.It was listed in a 1343 a tax list - called "Bederegister" - for all parishes with their villages in the county Loitz. Zarnekla is mentioned there as a village of the Gülzow parish and property of the city of Loitz. In bond to the 30-years-war Zarnekla was destroyed by fire completely in 1638 including the chapel on the graveyard.
From the time between the Peace of Westphalia (end of the 30-Years-War) 1648 and the Swedish Land Survey in 1697, there are known some documents about leasing the estate of Zarnekla. The documents of land survey 1697 mention a farmer Hans Poll and his son Michel Poll (Polle, Pohl).It seems that that Joachim Heinrich Leverentz was the first member of the Leverentz clan in Zarnekla.
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September 1, 2010