would this specific Rantzau or Rantzow lineage have something to do with
the one about which the following points are reported in Genealogics:
http://genealogics.org/getperson.php?personID=I00092388&tree=LEO
In 1678 Princess Dorothea Hedwig von Holstein-Norburg, at the age of 42,
married Count Christof von Rantzau. However she abandoned her husband, and
travelled to southern Europe. in 1681 in Rome, she announced to have given
birth to a son, sired by her husband. It is likely that the boy was from an
Italian orphanage. After her death, the boy, Alexander Leopold Anton,
claimed to be Count von Rantzau, while his 'mother's' estranged husband was
still alive.
He ended up in Holland and the Dutch East Indies. The nobility never fully
regarded him as one of theirs, and he and his issue married in a way
uncustomary for people of 'his' class in that era.
and by C. C. van Valkenberg of the Koninklijk Nederlandsch Genootschap voor
Geslacht- en Wapenkunde, reporting about a juvenile delinquent:
http://www.wargs.com/articles/ranzow.html
"... *Alexander Leopold Anthon* *..* shortly before had fallen into such a
loose and unbound behaviour and debauches, that he, suppliant, was afraid
that all good provisions, which the suppliant was willing to apply upon
him, were made illusive, and the said minor would rush into his own
destruction and would be ruined totally, if there were not going to be
taken any provisions by the Court, because the said young man, who was
still under the age of eighteen years, had not only involved himself with
light women, with one of whose he had stayed in an humble inn saying they
were husband and wife, stating to others that he would never leave this
woman, what so ever might occur, but also a few days ago by running wild
and vagabonding had recieved a cut in his cheek, and enlisting himself, as
he pretended, as a simple sailor to sail from these countries to Moscovia
in the service of His Majesty the Czar, to which extravagancies not heard
of in a young man of so few years the suppliant feared for heavier
sequences and an inevitable total ruin of the said minor, the suppliant
found himself obliged to represent it to this Court, humbly begging that
the Court might authorise the bailiff or one of his first officers to
apprehend the said *Alexander Leopold Anthon*, where ever he might be
found, and to bring and confine him in a house of correction in this
Province."
The sentence goes on for a while in the same way and the Court accorded *
Aragoni*'s request to confine *Alexander* in the house of correction of
Koudekerk.
I made some research in the criminal archives of Amsterdam if there could
be found anything about this street fight, but this was not the case.
Total ruin seemed to be near: ... regarded as a bastard by his own sayings,
enclosed in a house of correction in Koudekerk near Leyde, this boy ...
seemed to be lost without return.
The house of correction, where he was confined, was - as I mentioned
already - situated near Leyde. I tried very much to find peculiarities
about this house and looked up first, what Hellema, a specialist in this
field, might have written about it. He only mentiones it incidentally. The
archives of the Court of Holland contain records of inspection of houses of
correction only from 1729 onwards. In an edition of the Society Haerlem,
titled In een beterhuis van 1682 tot 1692 by Dr. A. H. Garrer, we can find
nevertheless the story of somehody who was confined in a house of
correction in Koudekerk, some years before *Alexander*. These houses of
correction were private institutions, where lunatics, feeble minded,
epileptics, débauchés of both sexes and all ages could be taken for
unlimlited time after authorisation given by the government. In Delft in
the 17th century there were thirteen and in Breda in the 18th more than
twenty of these houses. For genealogists the archives of these institutions
are not without importance, because one finds there material about many
people, whose course of life for understandable reasons are left open in
contemporary family books and manuscript genealogies...."