Before Waldheim, there was Volhynia

As we saw in the last post, the sixty-eight families who lived in Waldheim in 1848 were reported to have come to this Molotschna village from the province of Volhynia. The Gemeindebericht mentions three locations in particular.

(1) from the village Ostrowa in the Lutzkischen district on the estates of the nobleman Michael Bitschkowskij, where they had come from the Rokonosch district not far from the town Wissotzk from the manor of the nobleman Watzlaf Vorainy; (2) from the village Wolla on the estates of the nobleman Ignat Bitschkowskij, where they had come from the manor of Count Olisarow near they town of Rawalowka in the Lutzkischen district, and (3) from the district Novograd Volhynsk from the estate of Prince Ljubomirskij.

In a note to the report Margarete Woltner states, “The locations of the villages listed … could not be established. Apparently the names are garbled” (1941, 158 n. 4). The situation might not be as bleak as Woltner suggests, so we will take a step back to place the former Volhynian home of the people of Waldheim in broader context.

We begin by gaining a sense of Volhynia’s place within the larger Polish/Prussian and Russian world. In the map to the right, the yellow star where the red line starts is the area of Schwetz, Poland/West Prussia, where the Przechovka church was located; the red marker at the other end of the line is roughly the location of Ostrowa (or Ostrgog) in Volhynia. The distance between the two locations is approximately 340 miles.

The map below zooms out and gives us an even broader perspective. Both Schwetz and Ostrowa are still on the map, but now we have added a large area to the southeast, what was formerly called New Russia and today is known as the Ukraine. The second red line extends from Ostrowa in Volhynia to the center of the Molotschna colony (near) Waldheim. The distance is double that from Schwetz to Ostrowa: 680 miles. The point of presenting these maps first is to give a sense of how far the residents of Waldheim in Molotschna colony emigrated in comparison to the distance that their forebears traveled to go from Schwetz to Volhynia. We will come back to that original migration later. One other point to tuck away is that the road from Schwetz to Volhynia passes directly through the area of Warsaw. We may have occasion to revisit that fact in the future.

To be slightly more precise (although precision is impossible, since borders shifted first one way and then the other throughout history), Volhynia encompassed the area highlighted in yellow in the map below.

Now that we know generally where Volhynia was (between Poland and the Ukraine/New Russia) and how it was situated geographically in relation to Schwetz and to Molotschna, we are ready to return to the Volhynian locations from which the residents of Waldheim emigrated.

As already mentioned, Margarete Woltner believes that the village names are garbled. However, the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online’s article on Volhynia (Schrag 1959) identifies nearly all the villages mentioned in the Gemeindebericht. We will work through both the list and the article together, making reference to the more detailed map of Volhynia immediately below.

Map of Volhynia after Schroeder and Huebert 1996, 57.

1. The community record first mentions “Ostrowa in the Lutzkischen district on the estates of the nobleman Michael Bitschkowskij, where they had come from the Rokonosch district not far from the town Wissotzk from the manor of the nobleman Watzlaf Vorainy.” The term “Lutzkischen district” refers to the area around the non-Mennonite town of Lusk (aka Lucko, Lutsk, and Luzk) at the far left of the map. Although one might think that the mention of Ostrowa would be to the non-Mennonite town Ostrog (aka Ostroh, possibly Ostrowo), which is the black dot above the cluster of red dots southwest of the center of the map, that is actually not the case. As Schrag explains:

The best known of these migrations [from Neumark and Schwetz] was that of a group of 21 Mennonite families with the names of Beyer, Bose, Dirks, Voth, Nachtigall, Nickel, Pankratz, Richard, Sperling, Unruh, and Ziekle, who in 1811 entered into a contract with the nobleman Waclav Borejko, settling on his land and founding the vil­lage of Zofyovka located north of the town of Wysock on the Horyn [or Goryn] River. … The group left Zofyovka in 1828 and established “Ostrova” [or Ostrowa] which is identical with Jozefin, 20 miles northeast of Luck, Volhynia. They also settled in the neigh­boring village that they again named Zofyovka. Here they were on the land of Count Michael Bichkovski.

Schrag begins his explanation in a village to the north of this map, then tells of a move by certain families southwest to the area mentioned in the 1848 Gemeindebericht. The references to Ostrowa, Luck/Lutsk, and Count Michael Bitschkowskij confirm we are dealing with the same villages and areas. Thus, we can safely identify the first location from which the later residents of Waldheim came with the two red villages in the upper left of the map, northeast of the city of Lusk.

Two notes before we move on. (1) People of that time had no qualms about using the same village name for different locations in which they lived. For example the Mennonites in this group named their village Zofyovka in their first location (somewhat north and east of this map), and they gave their new village near Lusk the same name later on. We will see the same phenomenon repeated in what follows. (2) One of the families of this first group bore the last name Ziekle, which is probably an alternate spelling of the name we know as Zielke, as in Helena Zielke, David Buller’s first wife.

2. After Ostrowa comes “Wolla on the estates of the nobleman Ignat Bitschkowskij, where they had come from the manor of Count Olisarow near they town of Rawalowka in the Lutzkischen district.” According to Schrag, “The second group coming in 1806–18 settled near the town of Rafalovka on the Styr River some dis­tance north of Luck, on the land of Count Olisarov. Later this group moved to the colony of ‘Vola’ in Volhynia but neither the time of the move nor the location of the colony is known.”

The town Rafalovka (aka Rawalowka) is approximately 50 miles north of Lusk on the Styr River, so north of the edge of the map. As Schrag notes, colony Wolla/Vola is otherwise unknown and cannot be located. (Note as a matter of interest that this group of Mennonites, like the first, settled on the land of a different nobleman named Bitschkowskij, presumably a relative of the first. This probably means that Wolla/Vola was close to the other Bitschkowskij estate.)

3. The last Volhynian location is described more briefly: “from the district Novograd Volhynsk from the estate of Prince Ljubomirskij.” The town Novograd-Volynskij appears on the map just right of center. Note that the Waldheim Mennonites are not located in that town but in the area (district). Schrag explains, “A third group coming to Volhynia, some of which may have come as late as 1823, settled in two villages 20 miles south­west of Novograd Volynski, named *Waldheim (Waltajem) and Zabara (Dossidorf).” The two red dots southwest of Novograd-Volynskij are the villages referenced here.

One would think that everything has been tied up neatly, with the three Volhynian locations now correlated between the Gemeindebericht and Schrag and identified as best as anyone can. But this is where the matter turns fuzzy, since Schrag continues to talk about other Mennonite villages that he will later connect with Waldheim in Molotschna. He writes, “There is evi­dence that in this period some Dutch-Prussian Mennonites located at the villages of Horodyszcze, Bereza, and Melanienwald, all three approximately 25 miles northwest of Novograd Volynski. All three villages appear on the map above, moving northwest from Novograd-Volynskij. Having mentioned all these villages plus others in Volhynia, Schrag turns his attention to the migration to Molotschna colony:

In 1836 … the Men­nonites living in the above villages of Jozefin-Zofyovka [group 1 above], Waldheim-Zabara [group 3 above], and Horodyszcze-Bereza [Schrag’s additional group that is not mentioned in the Gemeindebericht], 40 families in all, left Volhynia, and settled in the south Ukrainian Molotschna Mennonite settlement, where they founded the village of Waldheim, a name carried with them from Volhynia. 

What are we to make of this? Given the fact that the Gemieindebericht’s description of the first and third groups appears to be reliable (not at all garbled), its identification of the second, Wolla group, should be accepted as correct until it is proven wrong. Schrag does not indicate his basis for offering a divergent explanation, so his remains a possible explanation, nothing more.

Although we are unable to answer all the questions that come to mind, we do know a bit more about the people who emigrated from Volhynia to Waldheim. Almost certainly that body included some Bullers, perhaps even one named David. Beyond doubt that group did include some Ziekle/Zielke families, among them probably my great-great-great-great grandmother Helena.

Note

* Clearly, it is of great interest that one of the Volhynian villages was named Waldheim, just as the Molotschna village was named.

Sources

Schrag, Martin H. 1959. Volhynia (Ukraine). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available here.

Schroeder, William, and Helmut T. Huebert. 1996.. Mennonite Historical Atlas. 2nd ed. Winnipeg: Springfield.

Woltner, Margarete. 1941. Die Gemeindeberichte von 1848 der deutschen Siedlungen am Schwarzen Meer. Sammlung Georg Leibbrandt 4. Leipzig: Hirzel.