Alexanderwohl 24

The previous post began our process of working back through the Alexanderwohl founder material by settling on a relatively final list of the village’s original founders and the years in which they left Prussia to settle in Molotschna. We were able to identify the earliest settlers for twenty-seven out of the thirty Wirstschaften, an impressive 90 percent of the entire village. 

This post will extend that list by determining the years in which these twenty-seven settlers took up residence in Alexanderwohl. Significantly, the emigration year was not always the Alexanderwohl settlement year; sometimes a family went to some other village first. Distinguishing these settlers from those who entered Molotschna and went directly to Alexanderwohl will help us identify more accurately the main Przechovka party that supposedly formed the core of the village.

But first … as noted in the prior post, going back through our work will give us a chance to spot any errors that may have crept in along the way, such as the one discovered in the preparation of this post. The error relates to the original settler of Wirtschaft 6: Peter Johann Unrau.

Happily, we identified the correct person when we covered this farmstead (here); the mistake was in the year assigned to his emigration and settlement. Originally I identified this person with a Peter Unrau who emigrated in 1819 (Rempel 2007, 136) who had a wife and two daughters. This seemed to be confirmed by the GRANDMA listing for this individual. What I missed is that one of Unrau’s two daughters born before 1819 actually died in 1815, so his nuclear family in 1819–1820 consisted of Unrau, his wife, and one daughter.

These facts (and the names) fit perfectly the Peter Unrau family who had a visa dated 17 August 1820 (Rempel 2007, 173) who, together with a female servant, settled in Russia in 1820.

Peter Unrau (Петр Унрау), whose family consists of 1 male and 3 females. Settled in Russia in the year 1820. They had with them 800 rubles cash, possessions valued at 406 rubles, 50 kopeks, 1 wagon, 2 horses and 2 head of cattle; wagon, horse or head of cattle cost 316 rubles. Settled at their own expense. (Rempel 2007, 177)

In light of this information, Unrau’s emigration and settlement date have been corrected to 1820 in the list below. 

The list is simple enough: it includes the Wirtschaft number, settler name, the year in which he emigrated to Molotschna, and the year in which he settled in Alexanderwohl. We will take special notice of cases in which the emigration and settlement dates differ. 

	Founding Settler	Emigration Date	Settlement Date
1	Martin Jacob Kornelsen	1820	1820
2	Heinrich Peter Block	1819	1823
3	????	—	—
4	Peter Jacob Voth	1820	1820
5	Heinrich David Schmidt	1819	1820
6	Peter Johann Unrau	1820	1820
7	David Bernhard Voth	1820	1820
8	Peter Franz Goerz	1819	1826
9	Jacob Peter Buller	1820	1820
10	David Johann Unrau	1820	1820
11	Heinrich Isaak Schroeder	1820	1820
12	Jacob Jacob Pankratz	1820	1820
13	????	—	—
14	Heinrich Peter Unrau	1819	1819
15	Jacob Jacob Buller	1819	1822
16	Johann Peter Ratzlaff	1820	1820
17	Heinrich Jacob Schmidt	1822	1822
18	Jacob David Schmidt	1819	1819
19	Peter Johann Reimer	1804	1822
20	Andreas David Schmidt	1819	1820
21	Peter Christian Dalke	1821	1821
22	Peter Benjamin Frey	1819	1821
23	Johann Peter Schroeder	1820	1820
24	Andreas Jakob Nachtigal	1820	1820
25	????	—	—
26	Heinrich Jakob Buller	1820	1820
27	Peter Benjamin Wedel	1820	1820
28	Peter Heinrich Voth	1820	1820
29	Andreas Peter Schmidt	1820	1820
30	David David Unrau	1820	1820

The emigration and settlement dates differ for the following Wirstschaften: 2, 5, 8, 15, 19, 20, and 22.

1. Peter Reimer’s (19) case is unique among Alexanderwohl residents: he emigrated to Molotschna in 1804, the first year of the colony’s existence, resided in but did not own a plot in Lichtenau, then became a landowner in Alexanderwohl shortly after the founding of the village.

2. Peter Goerz’s (8) situation is also different from the rest: he emigrated to Molotschna with his father and siblings in 1819 and settled in Grossweide; in 1826, at the age of twenty-eight, he secured his own farmstead in Alexanderwohl.

3. Several of the settlers emigrated in 1819—a year before the largest group from Przechovka—and lived first in Franztal before moving to Alexanderwohl: Heinrich Block (2), Jacob Buller (15), and Peter Frey (22).

4. Heinrich Schmidt (5) appears on a visa dated 20 July 1819 (Rempel 2007, 137) but is not reported to have settled until 1820 (Rempel 2007, 176). Similarly, Heinrich’s brother Andreas Schmidt also is listed on a 20 July 1819 visa but is counted as settling in 1820 (Rempel 2007, 137, 176).

We will circle back to the groups in numbers 3 and 4 in the following post, but first we need to sort the remaining settlers into their larger groups.

5. The majority (sixteen) of the settlers emigrated and settled in 1820: Wirtschaften 1, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30.

6. It appears that two settlers emigrated and settled in 1819: Heinrich Unrau (14) and Jacob Schmidt (18), the latter being the brother of the two Schmidts named in number 4 immediately above.

7. The list also reports that one person (Peter Dalke) emigrated and settled in 1821 and one (Heinrich Schmidt) emigrated and settled in 1822.

All the evidence thus far in hand is on the table, which makes this a good place to stop. The next post in this series will begin by reflecting on the presence of at least two and potentially four families who emigrated in 1819 and seemingly counted Alexanderwohl as their first home. This fact sits uneasily alongside the accepted history of Alexanderwohl, which reports that the first group arrived in 1820 and that the village was officially founded in 1821. How can—and should—we explain this apparent contradiction? The following post will begin with that very question.

Work Cited

Rempel. Peter. 2007. Mennonite Migration to Russia, 1788–1828. Edited by Alfred H. Redekopp and Richard D. Thiessen. Winnepeg: Manitoba Mennonite Historical Society.