An Experiment 1

Although blogging has been terribly light the past few weeks, work has continued in the background on matters pertaining to Alexanderwohl and Molotschna more broadly. The 1835 Russian census has been the focus of attention, since it holds considerable information about the broader Buller family and the context in which our forebears lived in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Believing that the best way to learn about something is to dig into it in detail, I decided to enter the information presented for Alexanderwohl into a spreadsheet. I was not entirely clear what I would do with the information once I had it entered or even if it would prove useful in a sortable spreadsheet form. I did not know (and still do not know) if someone else already had entered the census data into a spreadsheet. None of that really mattered, since the point of the exercise was to become intimately familiar with the structure and content and quirks and nuances of the census itself.

I have uploaded the current version (it is by no means a finished product) so anyone can view it here. I believe anyone can also copy and paste the data, which I welcome. I assume that there are a number of errors lurking (please advise me of any that you discover), and I have no doubt that some may question the arrangement of the information or even my decisions about what to include or to exclude. My only response is that this is an experiment, and a developing one at that—an experiment to find out if there might be any value to having the basic information of the 1835 Molotschna census entered into a publicly available spreadsheet.

The Alexanderwohl information that I entered was gleaned from the handwritten translation of the census distributed by the Manitoba Mennonite Historical Society (see here). Using someone else’s translation is clearly inferior to consulting copies of the actual pages, and one would no doubt want to check each entry in the spreadsheet against the original census before considering the file finished. (I believe that the original pages have been microfilmed, but I do not know if they have been scanned and saved in a more common graphics format.) Still, the translation represents a considerable amount of work and is a valuable entrée to the census.

The layout of the translation, which resembles that of the original census, can be seen in the scan of the page containing our ancestor Benjamin Benjamin (aka Benjamin Heinrich) Buller in Wirstschaft 16.

We will use this page from the MMHS translation to learn about the 1835 census in greater detail. (A larger version of the page is available here; I strongly encourage you to view the larger version.)

1. Notice first that males are listed on left-hand pages and females on the right. We have seen this setup before, both in an earlier look at the 1850 census (here) and in the Heinrichsdorf church book from roughly the same time (here). We will return to the gender-differentiated setup at a later time.

2. The pages are not numbered consecutively as we would number pages, with each side of a page being given a unique number. Rather, the front and back of a single sheet bear the same number. In other words, the front of the page on the left is numbered 489, and the page we see (what I am calling the back) is numbered “489 next side of the page.” Likewise, the page following the one shown on the right is numbered “490 next side of the page.”

3. The census pages are dated, and each Alexanderwohl page bears the date 18 February 1835. We will discuss why that date is recorded a little later.

4. The location of the place being counted is also identified clearly: Province of Taurida, District of Melitopol, Molochansk, Mennonite District Alexanderwohl.

5. The male and female pages record some, but not all, of the same types of information. Both males and females are identified by family number (left column) and by relation to the household head or some other male and by name (the widest column); in addition, the current age for all males and females listed as living in the household is recorded. 

Columns unique to the male side are: (1) arrivals according to last census and after same (which asks for a date or age to be provided); and (2) departures from previous number (which asks for a date to be supplied). Only one column is unique to the female side: during temporary separation (since what date). The point of this column escapes me, and a quick browse through many pages of the census implies that nothing is ever entered into this column. Thus for females we generally find entered only the female’s relation to a male listed in the census plus her name and age.

6. On the male side of the ledger, one frequently finds an entry such as “in the year of 1820” (before family 16), “in the year of 1822” (before family 17), or “in the year of 1819” (before family 18). These statements identify the year that a family first entered Russia.

7. Finally, barely visible in lower right of the right-hand page of this scan is a number: 13. Each page records the total number of people living in Alexanderwohl recorded on that page. The corresponding number for the male page is missing from the photocopy, but it no doubt reads “8” even though nine males are listed. Benjamin Benjamin Buller died in 1830, so his name has a – in the age column, which also means that he is not counted for the page total; only those with ages listed are counted.

Now that we have a sense of how the census pages are set up, we are ready to look at the spreadsheet and its record of most of this information. That will be the subject of the next post, after which we will begin to process some of the specific information that we find in the Alexanderwohl pages.