The previous post listed all thirty-two of the Mennonite families who emigrated from Przechovka to Molotschna colony in 1819. With this post we begin the process of finding out who those families were.
We will use a variety of resources to identify each head of household. We will, for example, seek to locate the household head in the Przechovka church book (PCB) and the 1835 census. We will also follow Rempel’s leads when he cross-references a person’s visa to a later settlement report. We will search GRANDMA, of course, to see if we can correlate a spouse name or the number of children listed with other records. We may even wander into records of Mennonite land sales (see here) to fill in our picture of one family or another.
Our primary goal will be to identify each head of household by GRANDMA and Przechovka church book number. To the extent that we succeed in doing so for each family, we will be able to determine if that family was, in fact, a member of the Przechovka church. To be clear, not all Przechovka church members are listed in the book, so we should not rely on that as our only source. Rather, we must access all sources, including GRANDMA, so that we can have confidence in our conclusions. We begin with the first name in our list.
1. Peter Becker is identified as a farmer from Przechovka with a wife, one son, and two daughters (Rempel 2007, 136). To complicate the issue, two other individuals in this party shared the same name: numbers 19 and 30 (see the list here). Peter Becker 19 had a wife and five daughters and Peter Becker 30 a wife and a daughter; we will try to use this family information to distinguish one Peter Becker from another.
GRANDMA lists eighty-six Peter Beckers but only identifies four of them as born in Przechovka. Or course, not all Przechovka Peter Beckers are identified as such in GRANDMA, so we must turn to the PCB. It lists sixteen different Peter Beckers, ten of whom were alive in 1819, four of whom were associated with Przechovka itself.
Of these four candidates, GM 32099/PCB 321 seems the most likely. Born in 1765, he had fathered numerous children, but eight of them died before 1819, and other of his children had established their own households by that time. In all likelihood, Peter Becker 32099 had one son just born and two or three daughters in his household, which corresponds well enough to the visa listing. We can conclude with reasonable confidence that Peter Becker 1 was GM 32099 and PCB 321, thus a certain member of the Przechovka church.
This enables us to make an additional identification. The 1835 Molotschna census lists a Peter Becker at Franztal 17. Not only did he emigrate in 1819, but he had a son Jacob by his fourth wife and three daughters, one of whom was apparently born after the move to Molotschna. This corresponds to the information given for GM 32099 and on the visa and thus implies that we have identified the correct Peter Becker: in 1819 he emigrated from Przechovka to Franztal in Molotschna colony and still lived there in 1835.
2. Jacob Wedel is listed as a Mennonite from Glugowko with a wife, three sons, and three daughters (Rempel 2007, 136). Why he is identified as a Mennonite and not by occupation escapes me. At any rate, the PCB lists seventeen Jacob Wedels, but only two are possible candidates for being identified as this individual; the others died before 1819, were too young to have six children in 1819, or were born after 1819.
The first candidate is Jacob Wedel PCB 268/GM 106682, who was born in 1774 and was thus forty-five in 1819. It seems reasonable to think that he had six children at home at that age, but we have no record of any of his children, so the question must remain open.
Jacob Wedel PCB 276/GM 106688, our second candidate, was born in 1784; at thirty-five, he also could easily have had six children in 1819. Interestingly, his birth family lived in Glugowko, the village where the emigrant Jacob Wedel lived. This inclines me to think that the PCB 276/GM 106688 is the man we are looking for, although we cannot be certain.
Curiously, the index to the 1835 Molotschna census lists only two Wedel families in the entire colony, neither of whom is named Jacob. Where Jacob settled in Molotschna and what happened to him after that must remain unknown. Although certainty eludes us with regard to the precise identify of Jacob Wedel, it seems likely that he was a member of the Przechovka church, since GRANDMA knows of no Jacob Wedels who were not members of that church.
3. Heinrich Unrau was a farmer from Przechovka whose only other family member was his wife. This implies that he was young, presumably just married and with no children, or older, with all his children grown and living on their own. After searching through various possibilities (the PCB lists fifteen Heinrich Unraus), it seems that the former is the correct explanation and that this individual was Heinrich Peter Unrau: PCB 1149/GM 86839.
He was born in 1796 or 1797 and married Anna Schmidt sometime around 1818 or 1819. Their first child was born 20 December 1820, thus after the 1819 emigration. According to the 1835 census, Heinrich Peter Unrau and family emigrated to Russia in 1819 and, surprisingly enough, settled in Alexanderwohl 14. This is not the first time we have encountered an original Alexanderwohl settler emigrating in 1819; in fact, we did so with regard to Heinrich himself in our earlier examination of Alexanderwohl’s original settlers (see here).
We will return to the issue of what this implies about the origins of Alexanderwohl. For now we can safely conclude that Heinrich Unrau was a Przechovka church member who emigrated to Molotschna in 1819.
4. Peter Wedel, a farmer from Dworzisko, had a wife and one son. There is another Peter Wedel in this group of thirty-two families (number 25), so we face a challenge similar to the one when we tried to identify Peter Becker above. Number 25 had a wife, five sons, and two daughters.
The PCB lists twenty-one Peter Wedels, but twelve can be excluded from consideration due to death or young age.
- One of the remaining nine was Elder Peter Wedel (PCB 1328), whom we know emigrated the following year.
- Another Peter Wedel (PCB 1342) was later associated with the Deutsch-Wymysle church and thus never went to Molotschna.
- PCB 287 was only loosely connected to the church, since he was one of the Brenkenhoffswalde in Neumark group.
- PCB 284 had five sons and two daughters, so he is likely the other Peter Wedel of this group. We will discuss him in greater detail later.
- PCB 262 was also a church elder, having been elected in 1809 (see GM 81631). His youngest son, who was born in 1800, was probably still at home, which would mean that his family included a wife and one son, just as the visa listing indicates.
- We know next to nothing about the four remaining Peter Wedels (PCB 264, 281, 1253, 1408) and thus can offer no opinion about any one of them.
In all likelihood, the Peter Wedel of the 1819 emigration was a member of the Przechovka church; we know of no Peter Wedels of that time who were not members. If this individual was PCB 262/GM 81631, then we have the interesting situation that one church elder emigrated in 1819 and another in 1820. Could this have been by design?
In the end, our conclusions concerning the Peter Wedel of the 1819 emigration must be tentative. It is impossible to state with certainty which Peter Wedel of Przechovka this is, and the 1835 census does not incude this family, so we do not know where they settled or what happened to them.
***
Thus far we have covered four families, all of whom were members of the Przechovka church who emigrated to Molotschna in 1819. The hypothesis that we are testing, that the 1820 group under Elder Peter Wedel was neither the first nor the largest group of Przechovka church members to emigrate to Molotschna, still seems plausible.
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| Name | PCB/GM | Comment | |
| 1 | Peter Becker | 321/32099 | settled at Franztal 17 |
| 2 | Jacob Wedel | 276/106688 | based on association with Glugowko |
| 3 | Heinrich Unrau | 1149/86839 | settled at Alexanderwohl 14 |
| 4 | Peter Wedel | ?? | perhaps PCB 262/GM 81631, a Przechovka elder |
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