This wooden plate was a gift to my grandmother, Camilla Bickler von Briesen, in 1948, from Ernst Adolf von Briesen, a distant cousin in Germany, in gratitude for CARE packages sent to him and his family after the war.
1298 is the date of the earliest known document mentioning (and signed by) a von Briesen: Christianus von Briesen was one of several witnesses on a document in that year for the Margraves of Brandenburg.