Franztal 13

As we continue working through the 1848 Franztal Gemeindebericht, translating the document and offering commentary on it as needed, we should not lose sight of why this village is important to us. From a broader perspective, Franztal was the first settlement of Mennonites who left the Przechovka church in West Prussia/Poland, being established a year earlier than the more famous congregation at Alexanderwohl. More narrowly, Franztal was the first Molotschna village in which a member of our wider Buller family (Jacob Jacob Buller) resided. Of course, he moved to Alexanderwohl within a few years (see here), but we can still consider Franztal the Buller family’s original home.

With that brief reminder, we are ready to proceed with the next paragraph; once we finish it, we will be nearly three-quarters through the entire community report.

Initially this village was given the name Pschuchowka, after the former residence of the settlers in Prussia. But since this name was not confirmed as a Polish one by the authorities, Ohm Benjamin Ratzlaff, who is currently elder of the Rudnerweide congregation but who was also one of the founders of this village, proposed the name Franztal, which was known to him from Prussia—everyone agreed.

the name Pschuchowka, after the former residence of the settlers in Prussia. According to the report, Franztal was initially given a different name: Pschuchowka. This is obviously an alternate spelling of Przechovka, the object of our attention on numerous occasions. The significance of this naming should not be missed or minimized: this first group of Mennonites to move from Przechovka to Molotschna wished to retain the name of their former home in their new location. Might this reflect a certain level of tension between the two main groups of immigrants, with the first group hoping to identify themselves as the real Przechovka? We should not read too much into the attempted naming, of course, but it is intriguing that this group of settlers tried to lay claim to the name even before the second group arrived.

this name was not confirmed as a Polish one by the authorities. The meaning of the words of this phrase are generally clear, the precise meaning of the phrase itself less so. One might read this to mean that the authorities (the noun is actually singular, so “authority”; perhaps Andrei M. Fadeev; see here) could not confirm that Przechovka was a legitimate Polish place name and so declined it for that reason. However, a more likely explanation is that the Russian official declined the name because it was obviously Polish. This is consistent with the fact that Molotschna villages consistently bear Prussian/Germanic names; not one was given a Polish name. Therefore Przechovka was presumably declined as the village name because it was Polish, not German.

Ohm Benjamin Ratzlaff. The word Ohm means uncle, but it was frequently used with reference to a church elder; that is the apparent significance here. This is not our first encounter with Benjamin Ratzlaff; we discussed his life rather thoroughly in an earlier post (see here). We need add here only that Ratzlaff receives his own entry in GAMEO (here). However, the entry is mistaken about Ratzlaff dying in Kansas; he died in the Henderson immigrant house and is buried at the Bethesda Cemetery.

currently elder of the Rudnerweide congregation. Like his father Peter, Benjamin Ratzlaff served in this key role. Benjamin was ordained elder in the Rudnerweide church in 1835, so he was obviously an elder when the community report was written in 1848 (he remained an elder for the rest of his days). The village Rudnerweide was roughly 2 miles directly west of Franztal, and most of Franztal’s residents were associated with that church.

one of the founders of this village. Ratzlaff was indeed one of the founders of Franztal, but he did not live there when the report was written. According to the 1835 Molotschna census, Ratzlaff moved to Rudnerweide in 1827, that is, eight years before he became an elder in the church.

known to him from Prussia. Benjamin Ratzlaff was born in Jeziorka, a small village not far from the Przechovka church, but he obviously knew of other Mennonite groups. In fact, he took the name Franztal from a Mennonite village in Neumark, roughly 120 miles west–southwest of Przechovka (see here). If you recall, Franztal and its sister village Brenkenhoffswalde were established by a group of Mennonites from (mostly) Jeziorka who retained contact and connections with their home church Przechovka. At least three Ratzlaff families were among the founders of Franztal, so Benjamin’s knowledge of and fondness for Franztal presumably stemmed from familial connections to that village. We do not know that any of the original founders of Franztal in Molotschna had spent time in Franztal in Neumark, but it is a question we will keep in mind as we continue to reconstruct the history of the village.