The previous post in this series (here) ended with a question: How do we explain the apparent conflict between the fact that at least two, and possibly four, of Alexanderwohl’s original settlers emigrated in 1819, a full year before the main group from Przechovka credited with establishing the village? This post will explore how both sets of facts might be true.
To recap, the pertinent facts are as follows:
1. The year in which Alexanderwohl was officially founded was 1821. At the beginning and for many years thereafter, the village consisted of thirty Wirtschaften, or farmsteads.
2. The majority of the villages’s founders emigrated from Przechovka in the latter half of 1820 and were both present for and involved in the founding in 1821.
3. A sizeable number of Przechovka church members emigrated to Molotschna in 1819, and at least two of them were in Molotschna when it was founded.
4. Two additional church members, brothers of one of the two mentioned in number 3, received a visa to enter Molotschna in 1819 but did not settle until 1820.
The problems are not so much with the main body of Przechovka members who founded the village as with the two members who emigrated a year earlier and the two who received a visa one year but did not emigrate until the following year. We will deal with these difficulties in reverse order.
As we discovered in the Moving to Molotschna series (here), passports authorizing travel away from one’s home were valid only for a year. This explains why we find records of two passports, one in 1819 and one in 1820, for Martin Kornelson (here). He did not travel within a year of receiving the first one, so he was compelled to get another, so that he had a valid Prussian passport to supply with his application for a Russian visa, or entrance permit.
The case of the two men discussed above (the brothers Heinrich and Andreas Schmidt) who received a visa in 1819 but did not emigrate until 1820 is essentially the same. In order to travel, one needed to carry both a passport that authorized travel away from home within Prussia and a visa that permitted one to cross the border and enter Russia. Clearly, the Schmidt brothers’ 1819 passport had expired by the time the Przechovka group journeyed toward Molotschna in 1820. How did they overcome this obstacle?
Three explanations come immediately to mind. First, it may be that the Schmidt brothers filed for and received new passports in 1820, which they then used to secure new visas to enter Russia. Obviously, since Martin Kornelson did this, it is feasible to conclude that the Schmidts did the same. The only problem is that, while we have documentary proof that Kornelson secured visas in two consecutive years, we have no such evidence for the Schmidts. It may have happened that way, but we really do not know.
Second, although passports expired in a year, we do not know that visas did the same. It is possible (we have no evidence one way or another at this point) that visas were open-ended, good for as long as the bearer needed. If so, then it may be that the Schmidt brothers decided to forego renewal of their passports, playing the odds that they were unlikely to be questioned (asked for their papers) as part of the large Przcheovka traveling group. They still had the documents that truly mattered: the visas that would gain them entry into Russia; consequently, they may have decided not to bother renewing their passports even though they were technically expired.
Third, it is possible that the Schmidt brothers actually emigrated to Molotschna in 1819, at the same time as another member of their family, brother Jacob Schmidt, and another individual from the Przechovka church: Heinrich Unrau. This explanation makes perfect sense of the passport and visa dates, but it creates another problem: the extended time between the emigration and settlement. Why, in other words, would Heinrich and Andreas Schmidt have emigrated in 1819 but only settled a year later, in 1820? Beyond that, what were they doing during that extended time, if not setting up their own households?
Each of these solutions explains some of the known facts but leaves several bothersome loose ends. In the end, it is difficult to know which is the closest to the truth. To complicate matters further, the third explanation is related to the other significant problem introduced at the outset of this post: the presence of two Przechovka church members who emigrated in 1819, not 1820, who were apparently involved in Alexanderwohl’s founding: Jacob Schmidt and Heinrich Unrau. What were these two men and their families doing in the time between their arrival and the founding of the village over a year later?
Before we offer possible answers, we need to set the context. Contrary to the impression sometimes given, the 1820 Przechovka group was neither the first nor the largest group to emigrate from this church. In fact, in 1819 a group of thirty Przechovka families emigrated to Molotschna; Jacob Schmidt and Heinrich Unrau were part of this group, and it is conceivable that Jacob’s brothers Heinrich and Andreas were also members of this traveling party (the third explanation suggested above).
Most of the 1819 group settled initially in Franztal; in fact, we have already encountered three individuals who did so and later moved to Alexanderwohl: Heinrich Block (Alexanderwohl 2), Jacob Buller (15), and Peter Frey (22). Importantly, these three settled in Alexanderwohl after the Przechovka 1820 group had founded the village; thus they were founding settlers but not part of the earliest settlement group (if that is not too confusing a distinction to make).
This leads us back to Jacob Schmidt and Heinrich Unrau, who were part of the 1819 traveling party and among the earliest settlers of Alexanderwohl. As far as we can ascertain, they did not first go to Franztal, as did most of the 1819 group. To ask the question again, what were these two men and their families doing in the time between their arrival and the founding of Alexanderwohl over a year later?
It is possible, one could argue, that they lived temporarily in Franztal with the rest of the 1819 group and joined the 1820 Przechovka group when they arrived. Unfortunately, documentary evidence of this is lacking (there is no mention of them living with another family), so it remains little more than a plausible guess.
It is also conceivable that these two families did not locate at any established village, that they went directly to the future site of Alexanderwohl and set up camp, as it were, in that location (or at least in the vicinity of that site). Why would they do that? Perhaps the 1819 families were something like an advance party whose task it was to scout the site of the village and to make whatever preparations they could with both their Molotschna neighbors and the governing authorities. Perhaps they worked with Johann Cornies and A. Fadeyev, a Russian official with oversight of the colony.
To be clear, this is no more than a (wild) guess, an attempt to explain how it was that two families from Przechovka came a year before the main group but showed no sign of ever intending to settle anywhere else than Alexanderwohl. Presumably they had some reason for emigrating in 1819 rather than 1820; perhaps it was to prepare the ground, both literally and figuratively, for the main body who would follow in 1820. If we knew more of what was involved with establishing a Molotschna village, we could say whether this guess seems reasonable or foolish. Perhaps in time we will learn more.
One final note before we lose sight of the larger discovery mentioned above. The earliest and largest emigration from Przechovka was not the 1820 one that led to the founding of Alexanderwohl; rather, it was the one that took place a year earlier and led to the founding of Franztal. If that village name sounds familiar, it is because we found a distant relative there: Jacob Jacob Buller, the original settler of Alexanderwohl 15 in 1822. We will spend time learning more about the 1819 emigration in a series that focuses more broadly on the various family groups who left Przechovka for Molotschna and regions beyond.
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