Find aids: Find book from 1951 (online searchable) Registraturbilddner: Deersheim belongs to the city of Osterwieck, Lkr. Harz, Saxony-Anhalt. In the late Middle Ages, Deersheim belonged to the Halberstadt monastery, which fell to the Electors of Brandenburg in 1650 as the principality of Halberstadt, and in 1816 was absorbed into the Prussian province of Saxony, which existed until 1945. Rechte in Deersheim also owned the Westerburg office. The Westerburg was already awarded in 1180 by the bishops of Halberstadt to the Counts of Regenstein. After the extinction of the Regensteiner in 1599, the dukes of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel inherited the office of Westerburg, but the Elector of Brandenburg was able to move in the fief as Prince of Halberstadt in 1670. The von Gustedt family was probably already resident in the parish of Deersheim and neighbouring Bexheim in 1406. In 1538 Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, as administrator of the diocese of Halberstadt, enfeoffed it with jurisdiction in both villages. In the 18th century the jurisdiction was divided between the manor and the Westerburg office, in 1842 it was completely in the office. In 1706 von Gustedt acquired the parish patronage of the Braunschweig monastery St. Blasius, after they already had the patronage of the chapel in Bexheim. The estate remained in family ownership until its expropriation in the course of the land reform in 1945. Inventory information: The manor archive of the von Gustedt family from Deersheim has an older order, as old signatures on the files and an old repertory from the 2nd decade of the 19th century prove. In addition, there seems to have been a land registry that was not passed through much later. A final order of the entire file and document material was planned for the period after the end of the Second World War by the Archive Advisory Office of the Province of Saxony. In the course of the land reform, however, the manor archive was salvaged by the state main archive and first transferred to Wernigerode, then to the Magdeburg archive. In this phase there were probably losses in the portfolio. For the archival new order, the old registry structure, which could be restored except for a few gaps, offered itself as a structuring system. The holdings of the old manor archive and a lot of loose and partly disordered files had to be distributed into this system. There is no denying that there are shortcomings in this division of the registry. Their disintegration, however, would have led to the dissolution of the collection, especially as the construction of the old manor archive had been severely disrupted. The numerous loose sheets were divided into the individual chapters and placed in folders at the end of each chapter. On the basis of a contract concluded in 2000, the holdings are kept as a deposit in the Saxony-Anhalt State Archives. The main index of the Deersheim manor archive was transferred from an access file to the present archive information system in January 2014. The documents handed over in connection with the conclusion of the deposit agreement by the von Gustedt family as a supplement to the deposit were already listed under the item "Annex" in 2013. Additional information: Literature: aristocratic archives in the Saxony-Anhalt state archives. Overview of the holdings, edited by Jörg Brückner, Andreas Erb and Christoph Volkmar (Sources on the History of Saxony-Anhalt; 20), Magdeburg 2012.
