Rennenkampff


Rennenkampff was a noble Baltic German family. It was of Westphalian origin and originated in Osnabrück. They held the title of Edler.

History

The Rennenkampff family was originally called Remmenkamp, the family was of Imperial German nobility. It was of Westphalian origin and descended from Osnabrück. The first known member was Johann Remmenkamp who lived in Münster in the 15th Century.
The first member of the family to appear in the Baltics was Andreas Remmenkamp, who immigrated to Riga in the mid-16th Century. His son Jürgen was enrolled into Imperial nobility, granted untitled noble status with the von and the surname Rennenkampff by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in 1602.
The Rennenkampffs were made famous by Jürgen's grandson Joachim, who was a jurist working in Riga during the 17th Century in Swedish Livonia. With the death of Georg von Rennenkampff in 1710, the family split into two branches: the senior Palloper headed by Georg's older son Franz, and the junior Helmet headed by his younger son of the same name. In 1728, Georg II von Rennenkampff was a Russian district court assessor of Pernau and was granted the title of Edler by Emperor Charles VI. They were enrolled into the Livonian, Estonian and Couronian Knighthoods in 1745, 1752 and 1801. In 1909, Karl Otto Woldemar Magnus and his brother Eduard Ernst von Rennenkampff were enrolled into Prussian nobility by Emperor Wilhelm II. During the Russian Civil War, almost all of the family members fled back to Germany.
The Rennenkampff family had a long history of military service in the Swedish and Russian Empires, including Paul Andreas and Karl Friedrich von Rennenkampff, both served in the Imperial Russian Army and fought Napoleon during the early 19th century. Most famous was the WWI general Paul von Rennenkampf. Many from the family were high-ranking officers and many had received the German award Pour le Mérite.

Notables

Baltic line

The Baltic lines mainly consisted of the Lutheran branches of the family:
The Russian lines mainly consisted of the Orthodox converted branches, mainly because many worked in mainland Russia and many converted to Orthodoxy due to marriages with Russian women as there were very few German women in mainland Russia:
The Rennenkampffs were huge landowners. In the 18th Century, they possessed about 20 estates with a total 94,000 hectares, the largest being the Alt-Kalzenau Manor, which covered a total of 15,000 hectares. In the 19th Century at their peak, the Rennenkampffs possessed 33 estates with the total of 97,000 hectares, the Borckholm Manor being the largest covered about 12,000 hectares. In the early 20th Century, the Rennenkampffs’ possessions and amount of land dramatically dropped. By the time of the Estonian Land Reform in 1919, they only possessed 44,000 hectares of land.

In Estonia

The coat of arms of the Edle Rennenkampff family of 1728 according to the Genealogical Handbook of the Baltic Knighthoods, Part Estonia by Baron Otto Magnus von Stackelberg: