Heinrichsdorf history 3

The claim is made in detail by John A. Boese and in summary form by Martin H. Schrag that certain Waldheim residents left that Molotschna village within a few years of arriving there for economic and religious reasons. The specifics of the claim, that Waldheim’s wealthy prohibited those who left from owning land, is easily checked, since we have both a list of Waldheim’s first forty landowners and a list of those who stated their intent to leave.

Comparing the two lists is messy in places, since some we find two Cornelius Unruhs, two Benjamin Unruhs, and two Jacob Bullers, and it is not always clear which one appears on one list or another. In addition, a few male heads of household listed among the landowners had apparently died, so all that appears on the 1845 list of returnees is the entry widow X, which leaves the identify of the deceased husband not entirely certain. In spite of this messiness, we can draw reasonable conclusions about the landed status of the Mennonites who left Waldheim and founded Heinrichsdorf.

1. The 1845 list (see here) contains the names of nearly fifty individuals who had declared their intent to leave Waldheim for Volhynia but arranges those persons into thirty-three families, each of which is identified by a head of household. It is these head of household names that interest us:

Cornelius Funk	Tobias Schultz	Andreas Schmidt
Cornelius? Unruh	Andreas Koehn*	Benjamin Buller the elder
Benjamin Ratzlaff	Samuel Boese	David Koehn
Jacob Buller	Benjamin (Peter?) Janz	Cornelius Balzer
Jacober Buller	Johann Ewert	Johann Worbel
Peter Buller	Heinrich Funk*	Jacob Pankratz
Heinrich Nachtigal	Heinrich Wedel the elder*	Friedrich Kunkel*
Cornelius Unruh	Widow Maria Ratzlaff	Michael Teske
Benjamin Unruh	Jacob Boese	David Nachtigal
Cornelius? Funk	Benjamin Ratzlaff	Widow Wilhelmina Bayer•
David Koehn	Johann Voth	Jacob Klassen

The four names marked with an * (Andreas Koehn, Heinrich Wedel, Friedrich Kunkel) are said to have remained in Waldheim, so they should be excluded from consideration, even though their names appear on the 1845 list. We are told later that Widow Wilhelmina Bayer (marked with a •) did not go to Volhynia, even though her son Georg did. This leaves us with twenty-eight names. If only a few of them were landowners in Waldheim, then Boese and Schrag’s claim gains plausibility; if a large number of them were landowners, that claim must be called into question.

2. The following table highlights in red those who were landowners:

Cornelius Funk	Tobias Schultz	Andreas Schmidt
Cornelius? Unruh		Benjamin Buller the elder
Benjamin Ratzlaff	Samuel Boese	David Koehn
Jacob Buller	Benjamin (Peter?) Janz	Cornelius Balzer
Jacober Buller	Johann Ewert	Johann Worbel
Peter Buller		Jacob Pankratz
Heinrich Nachtigal
Cornelius Unruh	Widow Maria Ratzlaff	Michael Teske
Benjamin Unruh	Jacob Boese	David Nachtigal
Cornelius? Funk	Benjamin Ratzlaff
David Koehn	Johann Voth	Jacob Klassen

Seventeen of the twenty-eight, or 61 percent, were Waldheim landowners. This makes it difficult to believe that economics was the primary motivation for this group’s decision to leave Waldheim.

3. An additional observation weakens Boese’s argument further. Boese seems to distinguish between the landowners who were already established in Waldheim and this “new group” whom the landowners sought “to keep … as a laboring class.” In fact, three of Waldheim’s original eight settlers (Michael Teske, Johann Worbel, Benjamin Ratzlaff) were among the returnees, and a fourth original settler (Friedrich Kunkel) initially declared his intent to leave but later reversed course and decided to stay. These facts are at odds with a simple division of the community into wealthy oldtimers and oppressed newcomers.

4. Although Boese’s account does not seem accurate for the group as a whole, it presumably describes the experience and perspective of some of the returnees—including his own ancestors. Interestingly, the 1845 list includes an entry for Jacob Boese as a head of household along with his brother Benjamin. The latter was John Boese’s grandfather, according to the GRANDMA database, which notes also that Benjamin was a wagon-maker who put in bids with the Russian government (see GM 280027; John A. Boese [70894] was the son of Abraham [280035]). As is evident in the table above, Jacob Boese was not a landowner, and neither was his brother Benjamin; they were rather laborers whose economic situation was less secure than that of landowners.

In the end, although Boese’s account and Schrag’s general statement may be true with regard to some of the returnees, land ownership probably does not explain why the majority of this group decided to return to Volhynia. Perhaps the motivation was more religious than economic, or maybe the economic aspect was not related to access to land but rather disappointing crops.

This latter possibility deserves further consideration, especially since the late 1840s were a time of crisis across Europe, with potato blight and poor harvests sometimes producing localized famine. It is too soon to know whether these sorts of factors played any role in this group’s decision to leave, but we should at least explore the possibility.

Works Cited

Boese, John A. 1967. The Prussian-Polish Mennonites Settling in South Dakota 1874 and Soon After. Freeman, SD: Pine Hill Press. Available online here.

Schrag, Martin H. 1959. Volhynia (Ukraine). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available online here.