WIETMARSCHEN
Founded in 1152.
Wietmarschen is a small town in the Grafschaft Bentheim, Lower Saxony. Its history centers on the Augustinian convent founded in 1152, which became the focal point of the surrounding Catholic community. While much of Bentheim turned Protestant during the Reformation, Wietmarschen and its neighboring villages remained Catholic.
The convent church held a miraculous statue of the Virgin Mary that made Wietmarschen a regional pilgrimage site. The parish records — baptisms, marriages, deaths — stretch back centuries and document the Luense family presence in the community.
Lundr. Luen. Luense.
The name Luense (and its variants Luen, Luens, Lünse) appears in Wietmarschen parish records. The etymological connection to Old Norse lundr (“sacred grove”) is significant — the region was part of the Old Saxon territory where Norse and Germanic naming conventions blended over centuries.
The oral history of the McGuire daughter living with the Luense family in Wietmarschen before emigrating connects the German Catholic and Irish Catholic strands of the family history. Though documentary evidence was lost in a house fire, the oral transmission is treated as legitimate record per the Lundr Way.
They left the moorlands.
Parish and civil records confirm the Luense emigrations: Theresia Benedikta Luen departed in 1846, Johann Hermann Luens in 1865, Arnold Luen in 1867, and Wilhelm Luen in 1887. Each crossed the Atlantic seeking land and opportunity in the American Midwest.
They carried with them the Catholic faith, the German language, the farming skills of the Bentheim moorlands, and the family name that would eventually become Luense — the name that now anchors Lund Studio and the Lundr brand to its ancestral root.
© 2026 Carter Luense · Lund Studio LLC · Bentheim · Heritage · φ