Przechovka Emigration 5

This series has a simple goal: to test the hypothesis that the 1820 group of Przechovka emigrants who founded the village Alexanderwohl were not the first group from that church to journey to and settle in Molotschna. The impression that the 1848 Alexanderwohl Gemeindebericht, or community report, conveys is that the entire church made the trek from West Prussia to New Russia in 1820 under the leadership of Elder Peter Wedel. If the hypothesis turns out to be true, if there was another group who made the journey before 1820, then the simple account of the received history will need to be revised somewhat to accommodate the more complex reality. 

Thus far we have discovered that the evidence from the first eight families examined offers support for the hypothesis that a group from the Przechovka church emigrated to and settled in Molotschna in 1819. We pick up the examination with the ninth family in Rempel’s listing of visas.

9. George Nachtigal’s village is not listed, nor is he identified by occupation or as a Mennonite; the visa reports simply that he had a wife, three sons, and two daughters. Because his name is not all that common—GRANDMA lists only twenty by that name over three centuries, and the Przechovka church book has only six—we are able to identify him relatively easily as George (Jeorgen) Jacob Nachtigal: PCB 662/GM 42260. 

In 1819 George and his wife Trincke Richerts had three sons and two daughters (one daughter had already died), a perfect match with the visa. Rempel cross-references from this visa to two settlement reports (Rempel 2007, 150, 158), which confirms that the family consisted of four males and three females and that they arrived in Molotschna in 1819. The second report states that the family settled in Franztal, and we find them there, in Wirtschaft 3, in the 1835 Molotschna census—another family from Przechovka who emigrated in 1819 and settled in Franztal.

10. Peter Unrau is identified as a Mennonite from Przechovka who had a wife and two daughters. The name is relatively common, appearing twelve times in the Przechovka church book (431 times in GRANDMA, if one counts both Unrau and Unruh). Of these twelve, only three are possibilities. One candidate is known to have emigrated in 1820; it is not known if the second ever emigrated at all. The third possibility, Peter Peter Unrau, appears much more promising, since his brother Heinrich Unrau (number 3 in this list) was a part of the 1819 group, and the 1835 census lists Peter Peter Unrau in Franztal 22 as an 1819 emigrant.

The only problem is that the number of this Peter Unrau’s children does not match. According to GRANDMA, in 1819 he and his wife Anna Bekker had only one daughter, not two, as stated on the visa. To complicate matters further, of the two settlement reports that almost certainly relate to this same family, one lists two daughters and another three (Rempel 2007, 154, 159). Perhaps Anna had another child after the first report, or maybe the reports are simply in error.

Whatever the explanation for these discrepancies, the census’s identification of Peter Peter Unrau as an 1819 settler in Franztal leaves little doubt about the identification. Therefore we can identify the man on the visa as Peter Unrau: PCB 1322/GM 61701. His brother Heinrich Peter Unrau also made the trip in 1819, then the two went in different directions, with Heinrich settling Alexanderwohl 14 (see further here) and Peter settling Franztal 22.

11. Martin Cornelsen was a Mennonite from Deutsch-Konopath whose family included a wife, two sons, and three daughters. Martin presents an interesting case, not due to any difficulty identifying him, but rather because he and his family did not emigrate in 1819. They had a passport and a visa to do; about that there is no question. However, as we discussed earlier (here), the family emigrated to Molotschna with the 1820 group, as recorded in a second visa dated 17 August 1820:

Martin Kornelsen from Konopath, his wife Anna 32 (b. ca. 1788), step-sons Peter Buller 11 (b. ca. 1809), David Buller 7 (b. ca. 1813), step-daughter Anna Buller 9 (b. ca. 1811), daughter Maria 5 (b. ca. 1815), Helena 1 (b. ca. 1819). Passport from Marienwerder issued on July 11, 1820. (Rempel 2007, 172)

Thus we know without doubt that this person was Martin Jacob Cornelsen, PCB 1250/GM 33801. He and his family, which included three children from his wife Anna Unrau’s first marriage to David Buller, settled Alexanderwohl 1.

As we noted in the post linked above, this situation reveals important information about the passport and visa system. Clearly, the documents authorizing travel within Prussia (passport) and entrance into Russia (visa) had some sort of expiration date, probably a year. Therefore, when the Cornelsen family delayed their move to 1820, they had to go through the process once again. To my knowledge, they were the only family of the 1819 group to do this.

Not to be missed in all this is that this is further confirmation that a group from Przechovka planned to emigrate in 1819; the only difference is that this family delayed their plans until 1820.

12. Martin Köhn was a Mennonite from Przechovka. The visa records no further details about him. Our usual sources offer little help in this case. GRANDMA lists only ten Martin Köhns, and not one of them was born before 1900. The Przechovka church book lists only five males named Martin in the entire church record of over 1,500 names, and four of the five are from the Cornelsen family (the other is a Nachtigal). 

There are Köhns listed in the Przechovka church book, to be sure: twenty-nine males and thirty-five females. Thus it is not surprising to find a Köhn listed with this group. The Przechovka Köhns are named Andreas, Bernd, David, Ehrenst, Hans, Harrem, Heinrich, Jacob, Peter, and Willem—nothing remotely close to Martin. The attempt to find Martin Köhn seems hopeless.

The problem, I suspect, is not that our usual sources are inadequate but that the source listing this name (Rempel 2007) is in error. What are the odds that, with only five males named Martin in the entire history of the Przechovka church, a history that encompassed over 1,500 names, two Martins would appear one after another in a list of thirty-two names? I imagine some reader could calculate the odds, but it strikes me as more than coincidental that we find at the top of page 137 of Rempel 2007 two men named Martin.

This strikes me as a scribal error, a matter of Rempel, or whoever composed the pages of his book, accidentally looking at the entry above, spelled Kornelsen in Rempel, when supplying the name of the Köhn entry. Biblical textual critics are quite familiar with this phenomenon, which they refer to as dittography: repeating a word when one’s eye jumps up or back a line. It would be easy to do, since both last names begin Ko-. Perhaps there is another explanation that will come to light. For the time being, this strikes me as a scribal mistake, which means we have no idea who the visa names. 

That this person was a Köhn is certain; which Köhn is a matter of speculation. The only Przechovka Köhn listed in the 1835 census is, I think, Jacob Heinrich Köhn (GM 60420; see also 41124), who was “accepted into the household” of Andreas David Schmidt, who himself emigrated to Molotschna in 1819 (see number 16 in the next post in this series). Could it be that the Köhn listed is actually Jacob Heinrich, who was apparently single at the time (thus the absence of wife and children in the visa entry) and was accepted into the household of another 1819 emigrant? The notion is intriguing but awaits some sort of evidence that moves it up the scale of plausibility.

***

This group of four has presented interesting challenges, with one person unidentified and another family planning to emigrate but then delaying for a year. In the end, however, we can link all of the emigrants to the Przechovka church, and we can identify two them within Franztal. The pattern that we have seen develop continues on both counts. 

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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
5	Heinrich Ratzlaff	141/47821	settled at Franztal 25
6	Anna Pankratz	140/43100	widow and sister to number 5 above
7	Jacob Becker	334/32008	Jacob passed away; his widow married Tobias Schmidt (number 28)
8	Adam Ratzlaff	192/4327	settled at Franztal 19
9	George Nachtigal	662/42260	settled at Franztal 3
10	Peter Unrau	1322/61701	settled at  Franztal 22
11	Martin Cornelsen	1250/33801	emigrated in 1820; settled at Alexanderwohl 1
12	Martin Köhn	??	first name probably an error

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.