A HEARTY WELCOME to the homepage of the GANSEFORTH family and the hotel ZUR SILBERNEN GANS (SILVER GOOSE) in Dersum (Emsland). The village of Dersum belongs politically to the Samtsgemeinde Dörpen (). Our Landgasthof (country hotel) is situated in the center of the place at Hauptstrasse 24-26 (the main road), only a few meters away from the parish church of St. Anthony. Ecclesiastically Dersum belonged for several hundred years until the middle of the 19th centuries to the parish of St. George at Steinbild; since a couple of years our parish is, together with the daughter parish of St.Michael at Neudersum, integrated into the spirital unity Heede .

My name is Gerd Ganseforth, and I am, like my father, grandfather and great-grandfather, landlord. My forefathers were also bakers, post office agents (postholders), had a grocery shop and ran a small agricultural business (farm).
We have been living for four centuries in the same house.
In Dersum are we since 400 years settled as farmers. At that time my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Hermann Gosevoort/Gansevoort
married the heiress Elske Bertermann. The Dersum Ganseforths and their descendants on the estate (the current Schwarte family) were and still are called "Elsken" after this Elske.

Since my great-grandfather had left his parental home and established himself as a baker, his family and descendancy are commonly called "Backers".
Before the Ganseforths came to Dersum, they had been living from times immemorial in the Haren/Wesuwee area. Our family name derives from a goose ford in the vicinity of our ancestral farm . The topographical or field name "Goseforth" in the present town of Haren (Ems ) recalls the origin of our clan.

The profession of baker appears in our family already at the beginning of the 15th century.At that time there lived in the -nowadays Dutch- town of Groningen, which then belonged to the Holy Roman Empire, a baker by the name Harmen Gosevoert or Herman Gansfort. He was, that is the saying, married to a noblewoman from he Clant dynasty, a daughter of Chieftain Henrik Clant of Scharmer. Her sister Odilia was the wife of the then mayor of Groningen, Koppen Jarghes.
Herman had a son, Wessel or Johannes Wesselus Gansefort(ius), whom his contemporaries called Lux Mundi ( =light of the world). Wessel was personal physician to Bishop David of Utrecht, a halfbrother of Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy, and a friend of Pope Sixtus IV, the founder of the Sixtine Chapel.

In the 17th century, numerous Gansevoorts (, as the name was predominatly written at that time -all togetherthere are up to 70 different spellings) were bakers and often also brewers, in he town of Groningen as well as in the Groningen area.

Once there was a brewer by the name Harmen Harmensze (van) Ganzvort/Gansevoort, who around 1650 migrated to America. He was with greatest likelihood born in the oldest part of our Dersum ancestral home.
Alice P. Kenney has written a wonderful book about the American branch of our family (The Gansevoorts of Albany, Syracuse 1969).
Leendert was the first Gansevoort to be born in the New World, then called "Nieuw Nederland". He married Catarina de Wandelaar of an old Dutch family. Their son was called Harme(n). There´s no picture of him, but of his wife, Magdalena Douw.
Then comes revolutionary general Peter Gansevoort, the Hero of Fort Stanwix, under whom the "Stars nd Stripes" were first unfurled in battle.
Peter had a pretty daughter by the name Maria who became the consort of merchant Allan Melville. Allan´s father was mayor Thomas Melvill of Boston, one of the "Indians" of the "Boston Tea Party". The Melvilles are finest Scottish nobility. The common forebear of the American Melvilles and the Earls of Leven and Melville in Scotland still flourishing today had come to the British isles with William the Conqueror.
Allan Melville´s and Maria Gansevoort´s son Hermann Melville (named after his mother´s brother Herman Gansevoort) is regarded as one of the most important writers of America and the world. Who does not know his novel Moby Dick (twice there has was a film made of - -1956 and 1997), the aventure tale of the white whale?

In the Emsland and especially in pastoral Dersum (that, however, can point to a growing industry with e.g. the worldwide known company Hero-Glas, specialized in production and refinement of glas), the history of our family was little "sensational". We were simple farmers, of whom some served as village mayors (including the present mayor of Dersum Hermann Schwarte, only son of the last Ganseforth heiress on the Dersum estate); a certain Hermann-Heinrich Ganseforth was general vicar of the bishop of Osnabrück (the diocese to which Dersum ecclesiastically belongs); Dr.Heinrich Ganseforth, the current boss of the traffic works ÜSTRA in Hannover; Professor Monika Ganseforth of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), member of the German federal parliament.

My great-grandfather Otto Heinrich Ganseforth, after leaving his father´s farm, settled down as baker and innkeeper in a modest house near the new- Gothic Catholic Church of St. Anthony. Even the village post office, 1987/88 renovated, was housed within the building and run/admionistrated by membersof the family. Since the beakery was given up for staff reasons in the year 1980, and the grocery shop closed down in 1984 (?), we have been concentrating on gastronomy.
Our halls and other premises, at several times extended and remodeled, offer the possibility for multiple events arnd are gladly used for wedding-, birthday and other family celebrations as well as for company and club feasts, conferences, balls etc.

Our more than 500 years old family coat of arms shows a silver goose in a blue field. That´s way our little country hotel is called Zur Silbernen Gans
(Silver Goose). It disposes of 5 double rooms and 1 single room as well as 3 "holiday apartments", which are all equipped with shower/WC and TV, partly with balcony. We offer in the fist place bed and (rich) breakfast. Bicyclers are most welcome and have the possibility to put their bikes under shelter.

The hotel Zur Silbernen Gans (Silver Goose) is situated in the middle of the village at the main road that leads in northern direction to Heede/Dörpen, southwards to Walchum, and is inspite of the central location a calm place surrounded by greenery.
Next railway station (7 km) for regional trains coming from Emden resp.Münster is Dörpen. A bicycle way/path accompanies/follows the course of the river Ems. From there one gets via the (paved) Emsweg after a few hundred meters to the main road (Hauptstrasse). Lefthand side is the Silver Goose greeting!

In the village of Dersum there are still three more public-houses: the Dersumer Dorfkrug at the Kirchstraße (church road) is quite near to us; the tavern of Käthe Kampen-Schulte is to be found in Wehrtannen at the road to Heede, and in the village district Neudersum you come across the Dorfkrug (Grummel-Kremer).

Dersum was for the first time documentarily mentioned in a 11th century register of Corvey monastery at the river Weser. Originally a pure farmer´s village, founded on an elevetin of land, Dersum has never had a manor house ) like e.g. the neighbour villages of Ahlen, Düthe, Heede, and Steinbild, and no historical church as Heede and Steinbild have one. But it is blessed with a very beautiful landscape with for instance an idyllic "peninsula" mysteriously named Rodo, formed by a loop of the river Ems. Some decades ago you met their a heronry; today wild swans breede there. And between Dersum and Walchum stands an ancient windmill without wings.

Dersum presents itself as it were as a point of rest from where to start excursions: there is the very old church in STEINBILD directly at the shore of the river Ems with inside the Madonna der Fahrenleute (Our Lady of the Shippers), formerly standing outside in niche within thechurch wall.In the old days the shippers passing by saluted her by huting.mit Hupen.
There is Haus Campe (Campe Manor) of the ancient noble barons of Dincklage (on whose ancestral castle in the Oldenburg area the Lion of Münster bishop Clemens August Cardinal Count of Galen, who showed a bold front to the Nazis, was born). Since there are residing people, once can but look at it from outside. In WALCHUM you meet a nice place to swim, the Herzogssee.
There is HEEDE with Tousendyearold Lime Tree within the former noble manor court, a medieval church, St. Peter in Chains, and a more recent house of God dedicated to Our Lady under the title Regina Universorum (=Queen of the Universe), for many a visitor a place of prayer, of reflection, perhaps new oientation, of consolation and encouragement, too. It is a testimony of local Marian devotion and recalls what happened in the outgoing thirties of the past century, when four village school girls between twelve and fourteen years old claimed that The One Who prays for us sinners had appeared to them, talked to them and revealed herself as the Queen of the Universe and the Queen of Pour Souls. (Pour Souls are according to Catholic teaching the souls of deceased people who are still in purgatory).
The bathing lake of Heede invites for a swim or surfing, in short: for recreation and fun . In the direction of Papenburg a visit of Gut Altenkamp (Altenkamp Manor) in Aschendorf is gratifying (changing exhibitions, concerts, etc). Formerly it has been the seat of the drosts of the Emsland, some sort of governors, who once founded the town of Papenburg as a fen-country colony (Fehnkolonie). Papenburg´s main attraction is the Meyer Werf with the world´s biggest dry dock, from where breathtaking big and beautiful cruising ships are ledin a likewise breathtaking manner through the "narrow way" until the open sea. Papenburg is also the gate to East Friesland, and the islands are no longer that far away.

The boundary of Dersum borders at the Kingdom of the Netherlands which is generally meant when one speaks of "Holland". The picturesque village of BOURTANGE invites at summer time to a spectacle in its reconstructed fortification.

Between DÖRPEN and LATHEN (second nearest stop for regional trains) takes "the" Transrapid its course, the testing stretch of the magnetic Schwebebahn which is worthwhile a visit and a trial tour.
More south near HAREN you find Dankern Castle of the barons of Landsberg-Velen with Germany´s biggest holiday center.
From Dersum you can also explore the HÜMMLING with the highest elevation of the otherwise totally flat/even Emsland, its stone age Hünengräber (mounds, enormous boulders); near the "metropole of the Hümmling", SÖGEL, there is finally the former hunting castle in baroque stile Clemenswerth of a prince from and of Bavaria, the Wittelsbachian Clemens August, in personal union resp. double function elector-archbishop of Cologne and bishop of Münster).A visit is recommandable.
The Emslandic-Bavarian love must be mutual, taking in account the fact that in the "EL-car mark area" there are pubs called "Bavarian Court", and Erdinger Weißbier is served. And not only "northern lights" (people from the north), but also Bajuvarians and those who live even more south will receive a warm welcome at the Silver Goose...