Alexanderwohl 6

The previous post in this series began our focused investigation of the village Alexanderwohl, the village in which our family first settled within Molotschna colony, the village in which Benjamin Heinrich Buller, presumably Grandpa Chris’s great-great-great grandfather, spent the last years of his life. We began by reading the 1848 Gemeindebericht (community report), which has been translated by a number of people, including a new one just discovered (here). 

The plan is to work carefully through various details recorded in the report, as a way of expanding our knowledge of one of our ancestral Russian villages. Thus we begin with the establishment of the village in the first half of the 1820s. The Gemeindebericht reports:

In 1821 22 families from District Schwetz in the Prussian administrative district of Marienwerder settled here; followed in 1823 by 7 families and in 1824 by yet another family. (trans. M. L. Garbin; see link above)

This sentence raises an important question: Who were these thirty families who first established the village of Alexanderwohl? They are not named in the Alexanderwohl report, but, fortunately, we have additional resources that will likely permit us to construct a reasonably complete answer. 

The first such resource is the 1835 Molotschna census. We have mentioned that census several times in the past (e.g., here and here), but now it merits even closer attention. The original census has been microfilmed several times (I may purchase a copy of that) and translated into English (a copy from the Mennonite Heritage Centre is on order); for the purposes of this post the index of names prepared by Richard D. Thiessen (here) will suffice. 

The screen shot below provides an example of the information contained in the index.

The entries are arranged alphabetically by last name, then alphabetically by first name for repeated surnames. An approximate (indicated by the abbreviation ca. = circa) date of birth is then specified, followed by a village name and number. The village name is self-explanatory; the number is the lot (or Wirtschaft) within the village (see the numbers in the corners of the Alexanderwohl Wirtschaften below; the map is from 1874, so the names on it can be ignored for our present purposes). 

Since all the entries include the village name and Wirtschaft, it is a simple matter to search for all the occurrences of Alexanderwohl and then list the heads of households in Alexanderwohl in numerical (i.e., plot) order.

We will begin to list names in a moment, but first we must remind ourselves that the census was taken in 1835, fourteen years after the village was established in 1821. Consequently, we cannot assume that any name listed in the census was an original Alexanderwohl settler: some probably were, but we cannot assume that every original settler was listed. 

Another thing to keep in mind is the fact that the index lists sixty-nine names for Alexanderwohl, spread across thirty-four Wirtschaften. Clearly, we will need to explain why a given plot has multiple names listed. There are, in general, reasonable explanations for this duplication; we will deal with all of them as we work through the list.

Instead of listing all sixty-nine names all at once, we will begin by examining Alexanderwohl 1 (in the upper left corner of the map above), which presents us not only multiple heads of household for one plot but also two Bullers listed with a Kornelsen (or Cornelsen). The three persons listed are:

•  Kornelsen, Martin Jakob (b. ca.1790)
•  Buller, Peter David (b. ca.1809)
•  Buller, David David (b. ca.1812)

I list them from oldest to youngest not only because the oldest was most likely the original settler but also because the two Bullers were still children when Alexanderwohl was established in 1821. If any of these three were the original (1821) settler of Alexanderwohl 1, it had to be Martin Kornelsen. We will return to that possibility in a moment, but first we need to explain why two Buller children are listed in the household of a Kornelsen in 1835, when Peter was twenty-six and David was twenty-three.

We can probably guess the source of the explanation: these two young men must have lost their father David (notice that both have the same middle name), after which their widowed mother married Martin Kornelsen. A quick check of GRANDMA confirms our hunch.

After Peter and David’s father David Buller died, their mother Anna Unrau married Martin Cornelsen and started a second family with him. Notice also the Immigration date for Anna (and the family): 17 August 1820. This is exactly the time during which the Przechovka church emigrated from Prussia to Molotschna (recall the Gemeindebericht mention of their meeting of Tsar Alexander 1 along the way on 14 September 1820). 

It seems clear, then, that Martin and Anna Cornelsen were the original settlers of Alexanderwohl 1 in the year 1821. We have identified our first original settlers rather easily—but more remains to be said. We have access to still other records that will supplement the information we have covered thus far, and we also need to explain why now-grown Peter and David Buller are listed at Alexanderwohl 1 as well. Not least, we want to determine how closely related Peter and David are to our own family line. All that will require some discussion, which will be offered in the next post in this series.