Dr. Brian Rector (PhD UGA) notes the following with regard to the reporting of Ruth Y. Rector posted on rector.org who says —
Hans Richter was the earliest ancestor (discovered) of the Virginia Rector family. He was probably born about the year 1550 in Saxony, and the Siegen city records show that he paid the fee for Siegen citizenship in 1585, being ‘from the country near Miessen’, from the city of Freiburg.
In response Dr. Rector notes:
Both of those town names are almost certainly misspelled because (according to the Google Maps) there is no such place as “Miessen” — only Meissen — and near Meissen there is a small city called Freiberg (with two e’s). Both are in Saxony — not in Lower Saxony, where the “Freiburg near Hamburg and Denmark” is located, as you can see in the attached snippet. Now why isn’t he described as being from “near Dresden”? Well, that information was almost certainly provided by Hans himself and I’m guessing he didn’t have any kin in Dresden; only in Freiburg and the country near Meissen and it would have been a good day’s walk from either of those places to Dresden. Then again, it’s almost 500 km from there to Siegen, so there’s no telling how he got there. Bottom line though, is that he was almost certainly from that area of Saxony, as reported by Ruth Y. Rector, not from Lower Saxony.
RectorSite 