The past few posts have taken a brief detour from our progression through the list of thirty-two 1819 emigrants from the Przechovka-area, first to correct our misidentification of Peter Becker 1 and then to learn more about Peter and other of these 1819 emigrants who are named in an 1819 register of Mennonites recently arrived in Wysock, Volhnyia (here and here). This post takes a step back both to summarize what he have learned and to reflect on its significance.
Of the eight families on the 1819 register (for the original translation, see here), seven appear on our list of thirty-two. This is not an insignificant number, representing nearly a quarter of all the 1819 Przechovka emigrants. What are we to make of the fact that so many of the 1819 emigrants appeared in Volhynia?
1. From a geographical perspective, it is not surprising that a traveling party turned up in Volhynia. A map with all the relevant locations marked shows why.
The site marked 1 in the upper left is the Przechovka area; number 3 in the lower right marks where Alexanderwohl was located. The approximate location of the village Wysock in the Rovno district of Volhynia is marked by the number 2. Clearly, Volhynia in general and Wysock in particular were on, or at least probably near, one route from Przechovka to Molotschna.
I do not know the exact route that the 1819 emigrants took on their journey. The best that we can do is to compare what we know of other parties. On the one hand, earlier Mennonites emigrating from West Prussia to Molotschna often passed through Grodno, which can be seen on the map directly east of the number 1 (slightly northeast of Bialystok), where they were registered and given funding for the remainder of the trek (see, e.g., Rempel 2007, 57–98). On the other hand, the 1820 group of Przechovka church members who established Alexanderwohl apparently took a route further south, since they were located just outside of Warsaw when they encountered Tsar Alexander I.
Whichever route the 1819 group (or groups) took, they probably would have passed relatively near Wysock in Volhynia, where Mennonites originally from the Przechovka church had been living since 1811. Thus, it is not at all surprising to learn that some of the 1819 emigrants are located at Wysock later that year.
2. Of the seven Przechovka emigrants named on the Wysock list, four are known to have ended up in Alexanderwohl. How do we explain this? The answer may be hinted at in the introduction to the Wysock register. There we read: “These Mennonites left the Kingdom of Prussia in the year 1819 and in the same year arrived in Wegtzin where they will spend the up-coming winter.” For some of the emigrants, Wyscock was apparently only a stop along the way, a place to spend the winter before traveling on to Molotschna in the spring.
In fact, there was a precedent for this. According to Heinrich Goerz,
the first group of future Molotschna settlers left Prussia in the summer of 1803. The immigrants got only as far as their brothers in Chortitza where they spent the winter. Fortunately, they were in the position to pay for food, animal feed and shelter, which provided their hosts with very welcome assistance. (Goerz 1993, 5)
It seems reasonable to conclude from the precedent and the wording of the register of names (“they will spend the up-coming winter”) that some of these 1819 emigrants never settled in Volhynia but rather only wintered there from late 1819 until early 1820.
3. Does the fact that four families pressed on to Molotschna imply that the other three families on the Wysock register did likewise? This is a more difficult question to answer, due to conflicting evidence. On the one hand, the register does not distinguish between some who were only spending the winter and some who were settling there; it seems to imply that all these families were only wintering in Wysock. On the other hand, we have no evidence that the three families who are not known to have continued on ever lived in Molotschna.
Granted, the family headed by widow Maria Schmidt is impossible to trace in later records, since she probably remarried and thus had a different last name. However, the other two families—that of Peter Becker and Benjamin Ratzlaff—do not appear in the 1835 Molotschna census, which is fairly strong evidence that they did not live in that colony between 1819 and 1835. The case should remain open, of course, but for now the most logical explanation is that these families remained in Volhynia, perhaps even in the Wysock area.
The most significant conclusion that we can draw from this recent detour is that we should not regard all those emigrating from Przechovka as identical. Some clearly were headed to Molotschna, albeit a year earlier than the accepted history would lead us to believe. Others probably stayed in Volhynia for at least several years and even up to nearly two decades. Further, we probably should not assume that all those moving to Russia did so in a large body like that described for the 1820 Przechovka group. It appears that the 1819 emigrants traveled in smaller groups, with one as small as seven families.
The more we learn about Mennonite history, the more intricate and nuanced our picture of the past becomes. This is as it should be. Life in the early decades of the nineteenth century was as complex as life is today, so we should not try to force the facts that come to light into simplistic, cookie-cutter models and explanations. Rather, we must follow the evidence wherever it leads even when the result is not as neat and simple as we would like.
Works Cited
Goerz, Heinrich. 1993. The Molotschna Settlement. Translated by Al Reimer and John B. Toews. Echo Historical Series. Winnipeg, MB: CMBC Publications and Manitoba Mennonite Historical Society.
Rempel. Peter. 2007. Mennonite Migration to Russia, 1788–1828. Edited by Alfred H. Redekopp and Richard D. Thiessen. Winnepeg: Manitoba Mennonite Historical Society.
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