We trace the history of our family back to only 1648, the end of the 30 years war that mixed everything upside down in Germany and other parts of Europe. We have this in common with many other families.

My familiy supposedly  immigrated at that time from the Netherlands. They were cloth makers or traders and first went to the Würzburg area, in southern Germany. Pretty soon though, they seem to have settled in Hamburg as there are some drawings showing Luetkens' in Hamburg who were senators or priests from the early 1700s. (The family did'nt have to pay for the drawings, because the "thankful citizens" or as we would say today the tax payers, did so. I also have to state that all the pictures only show men, while I think that the ladies really could have been looking even better!)

So far so good, the family crest - which I stressed here on my site a few times - was first mentioned 1710 in Fasti Pro-Consulares et Consulares Hamburgenses on table XIV under Nr. 265 as belonging to our family. The photograph below shows a reproduction of this source:

There may be details to mention, but I'm not a specialist on this. The palm tree anyway probably was a cloth scratcher, a tool required when producing cloth.