Thinking about Kleefeld

Considered on their own, Peter D and Sarah Siebert Buller’s reasons for moving from Kleefeld to the U.S. are clear and easy to grasp: they neither owned nor had reasonable prospects of owning land in Molotschna, so they emigrated to central Nebraska, where land was both available and affordable.

The question of why Johann Siebert left behind his full land allotment in Kleefeld is more difficult to answer. In hopes of contextualizing Johann’s decision somewhat, I examined the available historical data for Kleefeld from the relevant time period, to search for clues that might shed light on Johann’s rationale.

We begin with a list of the first landowners at Kleefeld when it was founded in 1854. Glenn Penner has helpfully compiled the list from the Peter J. Braun archives and posted it here. Other relevant documents included in Penner’s list are the Kleefeld school registers from the 1857–1858 and 1861–1862 school years (we already examined the first school register here) and a voting list from 1862. Because only owners of full land allotments had the right to vote, the names recorded in the voting list tells us who Kleefeld’s land owners were in September of that year.

Correlating the names on all four lists produces the following, which serves as the basis for several observations:

1854 Founders	1857–1858 School	1861–1862 School	1862 Voting List
Peter Warkentin		Peter Warkentin	Heinrich Martens
Claas Kroeker	Claas Kroeker		Abraham Matthies
Michael Plett	Michael Plett	Michael Plett	Michael Plett
Dietrich Janzen	Dietrich Janzen	Dietrich Janzen	Dietrich Janzen
Abraham Thiesen	Abraham Thiesen	Abraham Thiesen	Abraham Thiesen
Peter Reimer	Peter Reimer	Peter Reimer	Peter Reimer
Peter Richert	Peter Richert	Peter Richert	Peter Richert
Benjamin Schmidt			Benjamin Schmidt
Cornelius Friesen	Jacob Friesen	Jacob Friesen	Jacob Friesen
Cornelius Abrahams	Cornelius Abrahams		Cornelius Abrahams
Peter Huebert	Peter Huebert	Peter Huebert	Peter Huebert
Heinrich Schroeder		Heinrich Schroeder	Heinrich Schroeder
Johann Martens	Johann Martens	Johann Martens	Johann Martens
Franz Bahnman	Franz Bahnman	Franz Bahnman	Franz Bahnman
Jacob Harms	Jacob Harms	Jacob Harms	Jacob Harms
Gerhard Neufeldt	Gerhard Neufeldt		Peter Neufeldt
Jacob Quiring	Jacob Quiring	Jacob Quiring	Jacob Quiring
Jacob Loetkemann		Jacob Loetkemann	Jacob Loetkemann
Heinrich Bekker			Heinrich Bekker
Peter Rogalsky	Peter Rogalsky	Peter Rogalsky	Peter Rogalsky
Andreas Flaming	Andreas Flaming	Andreas Flaming	Andreas Flaming
Jacob Friesen	Jacob Friesen		Franz Kroeker
Abraham Thiessen	Daniel Konrad	Daniel Konrad	Daniel Konrad
Abraham Wiens	Abraham Wiens	Abraham Wiens	Abraham Wiens
Johann Loewen	Johann Loewen	Johann Loewen	Johann Loewen
Johann Willms		Johann Willms	Johann Willms
Peter Janzen		Peter Janzen	Peter Janzen
Aron Thiessen	Aron Thiessen	Aron Thiessen	Aron Thiessen
Benjamin Ratzlaff	Benjamin Ratzlaff	Benjamin Ratzlaff	Benjamin Ratzlaff
Peter Schmidt	Peter Schmidt	Peter Schmidt	Peter Schmidt
Peter Friesen			Peter Friesen
Peter Toews	Peter Toews	Peter Toews	Peter Toews
Abraham Koop	Gerhard Harder	Gerhard Harder	Gerhard Harder
Heinrich Rogalsky	Johann Siebert	Johann Siebert	Johann Siebert
Johann Quiring	Johann Quiring	Johann Quiring	Johann Quiring
Peter Quiring	Peter Quiring	Cornelius Matthies	Cornelius Matthies
Wilhelm Huebner		Wilhelm Huebner	Wilhelm Huebner
Cornelius Plett	Cornelius Plett	Cornelius Plett	Cornelius Plett
Peter Warkentin	Peter Warkentin	Peter Warkentin	Peter Warkentin
Johann Wiens	Johann Wiens	Johann Wiens	Johann Wiens

1. Comparing the first column with the fourth shows that 32 out of the original 40 landowners (i.e., 80 percent) still held their property after eight years, which testifies to the community’s stability, even shortly after its founding.

2. The high percentage of landowners who are also listed as fathers of school students (64 out of a possible 80) indicates that by and large Kleefeld was founded and inhabited by families, not older couples whose children were grown and out of the house or newlyweds with no children of school age.

3. As noted earlier, Johann Siebert was not one of Kleefeld’s original founders, but he did acquire Wirtschaft (farm) 34 from Heinrich Rogalsky early on, within the first three years after Kleefeld’s founding.

All that is well and good and interesting, except that it tells us little about why Johann decided to leave. It does, however, provide us a means for evaluating whether Johann was unusual among his neighbors in leaving a stable situation for the unknowns of the Nebraska plains. That is, the list that Glenn Penner compiled also includes all known GRANDMA ID numbers for the men included on these lists (GRANDMA assigns each person in the database an ID number; e.g., Grandpa is 278506). Using those numbers to find the individuals in the GRANDMA database, one can gain some insight into who did what in the years following 1862.

1. Of the 40 individuals listed in the 1862 (fourth) column, 38 can be identified in GRANDMA or found on later Kleefeld records.

2. Of those 38, 4 died before large-scale emigration to the U.S. began in the 1870s.

3. Of the remaining 34 individuals, 16 emigrated to North America (mostly to the U.S., but several to Canada; the 16 who emigrated are displayed in red font).

4. A slightly larger number (18) remained in Russia, but the percentage remaining (53 percent) was considerably below the commonly accepted Molotschna-wide average of 67 percent.

From this one might reasonably conclude that Johann’s decision to emigrate was not unusual, that he did what many other landowners in his community were doing, that he was part of a significant wave of Mennonites leaving Kleefeld.

However, one additional consideration complicates this picture. From GRANDMA, we know not only who emigrated but also when each person or family did so. The distribution for Kleefeld is interesting:

• 1874: 4
• 1875: 6
• 1876: 1
• 1877: 2
• 1878: 2
• 1879: 1

Care to guess who was the only landowner to leave in 1879, who was the last one to leave during this period of emigration? Johann, of course.

So where does this lead and leave us? Although we may not have any greater insight into why Johann left Russia (yet), we can probably exclude several explanations.

First, Johann presumably enjoyed a stable life. By 1879, he had owned and farmed Wirtschaft 34 for over two decades. In all likelihood, there was no economic compulsion to leave.

Second, he did not leave with the first groups to emigrate, when the fear of russification and loss of Mennonite privilege was felt most acutely. By the time Johann left, those fears had largely subsided, and life was reasonably calm again in Molotschna. (More on these matters when we return to Bullers in Molotschna sometime in the not-too-distant future.)

Third, his decision was apparently well thought out and carefully considered. Johann did not rush off with the first ten families of the first two years of emigration; rather, he left in his own time and on his own terms. I view him being the last landowner to emigrate from Kleefeld not as a sign of being a Johann-come-lately but as evidence of careful reflection and thoughtful planning.

Having excluded these potential reasons for Johann and clan moving to the U.S., can we suggest a positive explanation instead? I suspect that we can, although it will require a little more digging and discovery. Suffice it to say for the moment that it would not be surprising if, rather than finances or politics or religion driving the decision, it really was all about the family.