Quite by accident I recently stumbled upon three videos of former Mennonite villages in Molotschna taken by Jacob Barch and edited by Rita Dick. What sets these three apart are that Jacob Barch used a drone to provide an aerial view of the villages. The result for me was an increased understanding of the layout of the typical village and a greater appreciation for the terrain that the Mennonite settlers turned into highly productive land.
Credit is due to the Chortitza: Mennonitische Geschichte und Ahnenforschung website (home page) for linking to the videos plus over a hundred photographs that were also taken during the drone flights (see here). According to the description on the page just linked, Barch visited Elisabethal (also spelled Elisabeththal) and other Molotschna villages, including Alexandertal, Pordenau, Mariental, Gnadenfeld, Grossweide, Sparrau, Mariawohl, Orloff, Blumenort, Rosenort, Juschnanlee, Alexanderkrone, Schönsee, Fischau, and Muntau. It is not clear to me whether he took drone videos from each site, since not all the villages mentioned appear in the videos. My hope is that Barch has other videos to share, especially one showing Alexanderkrone.
The captions and narration within the videos are in German, but understanding of that language is not required to follow along. For example, “Blick auf [village name] aus östlicher Richtung” simply means “view of [village name] from the east.” The phrase “westlicher Richtung,” of course, means “from the west.” Other words encountered include the following:
- ehemalig(e): former
- Friedhof: cemetery
- Fundament: foundation
- Haus: house
- heute: today
- Hof: farmyard
- Kindern: children
- Kirche: church
- Krankenhaus: hospital
- Mitte: middle, center
- Schule: school
- Strasse or Straße: street, road
- Weg: way
This post will introduce and comment on two of the videos, with a later post dedicated to the third.
1. Molotschna Kolonie 2017, Überflüge mit der Drohne. To view this video, click here (8:30 in length).
The video begins with a brief description, which can be translated as follows:
Jacob Barch visited the former Molotschna colony in September 2017 and used a drone to fly over Elisabeththal, Pordenau, Marienthal, Alexanderkrone, Fischau, and Muntau. In 2016 he had already taken some photos of Elisabeththal and the surrounding area. His ancestors come from Elisabeththal, Molochna, and Wohldemfürst, Kuban [colony].
After this introduction, Barch locates the villages visited on a map, a portion of which is reproduced below. The first half of the video focuses on Elisabethal (number 1 on the map), where Barch’s family lived. At the 3:58 mark the video shifts to Mariental (number 2), several villages east of Elisabethal. My reason for including this map is to highlight how close Elisabethal and Mariental were to several villages of interest to us.
Alexanderkrone, located west of Elisabethal, was home to Peter D and Sarah Siebert Buller and the birthplace of Peter P. One village further west was Kleefeld, where Peter D and Sarah lived before journeying to the United States. The two arrows on the left point to these two villages. The subject of our recent interest, Franztal, was northeast of Mariental (right arrow). Seeing with our own eyes the layout of and land surrounding these two villages helps us to imagine more clearly and accurately the setting that our ancestors left to settle in Nebraska.
If you look closely and quickly at the Mariental village map at the 4:13 mark, you will see the name Buller on one of the plots. The name Quiring is written alongside Buller, which presumably signals that the two families each possessed a half-Wirtschaft.
The second half of the video surveys the villages of Neu-Halbstadt and Muntau in the northwest corner of the colony. We have no known connection with those villages
2. Fischau, Molotschna Kolonie, Überflüge mit der Drohne 2017. To view this video, click here (2:52 in length).
The village Fischau was one of the original Mennonite villages in Molotschna, being founded in 1804. As seen on the map, Fischau was on the far west side of Molotschna along the Molochnaia River.
The significance of the brick pile at the 1:39 mark is that apparently most yards contain bricks from the school, which was disassembled sometime after 1996, when the photograph of the standing school was taken. At 2:16 the caption informs us that only two gravestones in the cemetery remain: one for Katarina Enns and one for an unknown Wiebe. The message is clear, I think: the remains of the Mennonite habitation of Molotschna are steadily eroding away.
Several things stand out for me in these videos. First, the aerial shots looking down Elisabethal’s center street show clearly how spread out or, perhaps better, stretched out the typical village was. It is one thing to read about the layout of the villages, quite another to see it firsthand. Second, it is not hard to imagine how barren the original landscape was before the Mennonites arrived, since much of the farmland is devoid of trees even now. However, one also sees clearly the remnants of the tree-planting efforts of Molotschna’s first settlers, not only in the numerous trees in the village proper but also in the many hedge rows that separate fields. Third and last, I thought Nebraska was flat, but the southern part of Molotschna seems even flatter, if that is possible, with an unobstructed view of the horizon miles upon miles in the distance.
The third video (11:32 in length) returns to Elisabethal and the area surrounding the village. We will explore that video together in a subsequent post.
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