As the Roman empire receded around 400 AD, Limmers took the seat of Limmer in Germany They were quiet happy in their castle for hundreds of years until the house of Hanover seized it around 750 AD.
Undeterred, they built themselves longboats and rowed to England where, they settled in the king's forests of Hampshire. They felled trees, built roundhouses and formed villages. A peaceful, practical Saxon people, they soon set about making themselves useful to the community digging ponds for the village water supply and clearing land to farm.
The honest owned windmills, and water mills, manufactured cloth, made top notch boots, sold grain, farmed, owned famous, (or perhaps infamous), hotels or drove omnibuses The dishonest tried a little smuggling, 'Borrowed' a Gelding, got themselves excommunicated, or even transported.
This is the story of ordinary family folk surviving as a family through conflict, black death, legal disputes, civil war, famine and industrial revolution. It shows how they weathered the reformation and spread into richer and poorer sections of society. It shows how some survived, living on the poor register, while others felt uncomfortable Hobnobbing with the rich and famous
All life is here.
Excerpt:
The internet is not a place to take information at its face value. A simple error on one site may be repeated rapidly as fact on many others. Verification of data is not easy because sources are rarely listed. Facts and opinions not always clearly separated, lead to conclusions that are not logical.
Books are no different. Books often quote information as definitive because of the authoritative way they are written, it is easy to accept a statement as true simply because it is in black and white. In researching Limmer ancestry, there are a number of books claiming to give the source of the name, some of these make assumptions that a little further investigation proves to be misleading.
Beside this, all knowledge is progressive. Some facts of today will be laughed at tomorrow as though they were written by the Flat Earth Society, simply because another fact comes to light that requires a change to foundational building blocks of a logical chain. Thus, the process has to begin again.
That is not to say there is no error, bad logic or wrongly interpreted facts in these Jottings. I am sure there are. Errors just wait for one vital, undiscovered clue to change the picture once again. Overall, I hope, to have assembled a jigsaw puzzle, albeit a picture with bits missing, but complete enough to predict and appreciate the whole. I hope it is adequate to achieve my purpose in writing, which is not so much to give the definitive volume on ancestry but to discover the character of the Limmer family as it has been passed down through the years. I hope to see how Limmers coped with the trials and tribulations of their day. I hope to discover their values, their interests, their passions. I hope to uncover their family relationships, how they valued education, how they treated the poor or the rich. I hope to feel proud where they achieve and smile at any antics, (the name Lymmer suggests there will be a few of those).
To do this we need for example, to separate the term 'lymmer' and the surname Limmer. The Lymme family is given a large part of space in part one of this book - not because it gave rise to the surname Limmer, (I am sure it did not), but because the Lymme family, (having taken their name from Lymme the town), seem to have been instrumental in spreading the term limmer, (rather than the surname Limmer), far and wide. Some have claimed Lymme to be the source of Limmer lines, but it is far from proven. The Lymmes certainly influenced the term limmer, not least because they were an influential family whose character portrayed many characteristics associated with roughness and rudeness that became attached to the term limmer, (knights with coarse manners and breed of vicious dogs are two examples). They may have earned the nickname limmer without changing their surname because of their strong fighting character.
