Posted on Facebook on 17 February 2017.

The castle Ludwigsburg was built between 1577 and 1592 near the village of Loissin. On the attached maps it is seen that the castle is located close to the Ostsee beach, in the north-east of Germany. The nearest city is Greifswald. The nearby major city, Stettin, was renamed Szczecin in 1945.

I have translated "Schloss" by castle. Ludwigsburg is however not a fortress but a settlement, as is clear from the pictures at http://www.ludwigsburg-mv.de/start.html.

In 1810 the castle was bought by Johann Philipp Hermann Weißenborn, a respected grain merchant from Greifswald. His male descendants owned the castle until 1945. They must have been rather wealthy, as the castle was maintained well, further embellished and equiped with the comforts of the day.

In 1945 the widow of Carl Weißenborn fled with two of her sons for the approaching Russian troops. Her two other sons had been killed in the war. The castle was expropriated and became the property of the village of Loissin. In 1990 Richard Weissenborn, one of the surviving sons, took the initiative to acquire the castle with the help of a dedicated society and to restore it as far as possible.

The data I gathered for Berlin brilliantly confirmed my hypothesis about the Weis(s)enborns originating from Thüringen and its border areas. Many of the individuals in Berlin proved to be members of only a few families which originated from Langensalza, Sollstedt Vollenborn, Seebach, Bendeleben and Bachleben in Thüringen. When I can consult the registers of Berlin from before 1874, I expect to find the evidence that the remaining families have also migrated to this city: from the start of the 19th century Berlin has drawn people towards it like iron to a magnet.

Until last week I had an incomplete pedigree from Johann Philipp Hermann to the present day and some unconnected data on learned and well-to-do Weissenborns in Greifswald in the middle of the 17th century. Did these Weissenborns also originate from Thüringen and its border areas? They were apparently already in Greifswald before the end of the 30 Years' War.

Erich Weissenborn, one of their descendants, knew they did. I am indebted to him but I cannot thank him in person, as he summarized what he had found in a publication of only a few lines in ... 1905. I found these lines on the internet when I was looking for Martin Weissenborn, the owner of Ludwigsburg who has substantially modernised the castle from 1906 until 1910. Here you can find Erich's lines: https://archive.org/stream/archivfurstammun05rheu/archivfurstammun05rheu_djvu.txt. I hope to find Erich's full work on the Weissenborns. I have no indications where to look for it.

Erich Weissenborn wrote that he had found the following entries in the "Stettiner Bürgerbuch":
1575: Martin Weissenborn, a furrier from Zeitz.
February 4, 1604: Jürgen Weissenborn, a furrier and citizen.
February 29, 1640: Jürgen Weissenborn, a furrier and citizen.
He also found a Jürgen Weissenborn - whom he indicated as "III" - who was born in Stettin in April 1650 and who had a son Franz Christoph in Greifswald in 1699.

The town of Zeitz is located in the south of Saxony-Anhalt, on the border with Thüringen, 10 km away from the village Weißenborn bei Droyßig and 12 km from the village Weißenborn bei Bröckau. The hypothesis that virtually all Weissenborns originate from Thüringen has been confirmed explicitly for the Weissenborns in the north-east of Germany.