oldenburg-l - Nachricht 2008-05 00000

[Mary Westerback <mwesterback(a)wavecable.com>]

My great-grandmother, Mary Coors was born in Germany on August 19, 1839.
I am trying to find out about the place where she was born and if she
had a brother Henry.
It has been impossible to find anything here in the United States.  In
America she married Friedrick Haeberlin from Lindau.
 
I wonder if there is or was a Lutheran Church in Leeste.  Can anyone
help me with this information?  Is there any way to contact people who
might be able to help?
 
The family has a very illegible certificate of her birth and baptism. It
does have the church seal and I can e-mail the document if that would
help.   The document is in terrible condition and the writing is very
hard to read.  Three of my friends who speak German helped me.  They
tell me the document is in a combination of Latin and Old German
 
 
What we think we have deciphered is:
 
It seems a daughter (probably Marie) was born on August 19, 1839 to
houseman Hermann Coors and his wife Dorothea Castens in Hagen.  It looks
like a baptism took place later in 1839 in a month ending in " ber"
(September, October, November, December) perhaps in Winkel. (There is a
big piece torn out of document)
 
The document (partially destroyed) has a "Seal of the Church" and is
apparently signed by Botcher (accent over the o).  It records a date of
26 or 28 August, 1879.
 
My friend writes:
 
Finally found some leads in a very detailed old atlas of Germany,
looking up place names:   Leeste is a small town, a couple of miles
south of the city limits of Bremen.  There also is a town about 20 miles
north of Bremen.  First I looked for Geeste, but that turned out to be a
river in the same neck of the woods, but when I started looking for
Hagen, everything fell into place and started to make sense.  Ludeke is
a name with a distinct NW German sound to it (might be a Frisian name).
So it has to be a document issued by the church in Leeste (not Geeste).
 
My friend's hypothesis: the pastor (?) of the church, writing a document
to be mailed to the U.S. tried to use the Latin alphabet, but by habit
kept slipping back into the Old German script.
 
P. S,  If I had not had such a detailed map and stumbled across the name
while trying to locate Hagen by the map coordinates I never would have
found out that it was Leeste. .