Is Wegtzin actually Wysock?

The previous post attempted to identify the town close to which Benjamin and Helena Buller, as well as a number of other Mennonite families, are said to have settled. The translator’s reading of Wegtzin seems wrong (at least the We- beginning of the name), so we searched for the name of the nobleman on whose property these families settled, Waclav Borejko, in hopes of discovering where his estate was located.

What we discovered was an encyclopedia article (Schrag 1959) on Volhynia that suggests the hypothesis that Wegtzin is actually Wysock. The key paragraph from the article reads:

Additional Dutch-Prussian Mennonites came to Volhynia in 1806–18 and possibly later. … The best known of these migrations 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 River.

To state the question simply, is the migration that Schrag describes the same as that documented in the Rovno register that we have been examining? If so, then Wegtzin is probably Wysock. If, on the other hand, Schrag’s migration is something different, then we probably need to continue searching for the actual location of Wegtzin (or whatever the town’s name is).

Wysock (modern Vysots’k) to the left and below center. The
Mennonite village Zofyovka is marked by the red x to the northeast.

With all that as background, let us compare the Schrag article with the Rovno registers. The use of the plural “registers” is intentional, since there is another Rovno register that we have not yet examined.

The one that we consulted earlier can be found here. The new one is also available online, posted here. For the sake of simplicity, we will refer to the one we have already looked at as Rovno 1 and the new register as Rovno 2. This does not imply anything about the order in which the registers were written, and it may well be the case that Rovno 2 was compiled before Rovno 1.  Now on to the comparisons.

The Schrag article provides two important pieces of information that we can compare with Rovno 1 and 2: the number of families who moved to the estate of Waclav Borejko (twenty-one) and their last names. What do the Rovno registers have to say?

Rovno 1 lists eighteen different families, and Rovno 2 documents an additional eight, for twenty-six total. Not an exact match with Schrag’s twenty-one, but not wildly different. What about the names? Schrag lists Beyer, Bose, Dirks, Voth, Nachtigall, Nickel, Pankratz, Richard, Sperling, Unruh, and Ziekle. Obviously, Buller is not one of the surnames that Schrag lists, but there are other matches, which the following table helps us see.

Rovno 1	Schrag
Heinrich Dwerkb	Dirks
Andreas Buller
Jacob Richert	Richard
David Nachtigal	Nachtigall
Jacob Tzlivk	Ziekle
David Foth	Voth
Martin Bier	Beyer
Heinrich Schpulingo	Sperling?
Christian Tik
Philip Bier	Beyer
Karl Baltzer
Johan Nickel	Nickel
Erdman Nickel	Nickel
Karl Wedel
David Koehn
Peter Schmidt
Jacob Pankratz	Pankratz
Benjamin Buller
Rovno 2
Benjamin Ratzlaff
Heinrich Unruh	Unruh
Andreas Schmidt
Jacob Schmidt
Heinrich Schmidt
Peter Becker
George Tzeevka	Ziekle?
Maria Schmidt

The correspondence between the Schrag list and Rovno 1 is striking: eleven of the eighteen families in Rovno 1 appear to be Schrag family names. Two more in Rovno 2 are in Schrag’s list. To look at the question from the opposite side, ten of the eleven names that Schrag lists appear on the Rovno registers. Only the surname Bose (Boese, Boehs, or Bosch?) is missing.

Ten out of eleven is a high degree of correspondence (91 percent), probably enough to convince most that Schrag’s article is describing what is documented in the two primary sources: Rovno 1 and 2. Of course, because we do not know on what Schrag based his conclusions,* we cannot be certain that he and the Rovno registers are describing the same migration; nevertheless, it seems highly probable that they are, likely enough, in fact, that we can tentatively conclude that Wegtzin is Wysock, which allows us to locate Benjamin and Helena and David Buller more precisely.

According to Schrag, the Mennonite emigrants to Volhynia during the years 1806–1818 settled on Waclav Borejko’s land and founded “the vil­lage of Zofyovka located north of the town of Wysock on the Horyn River.” As is evident on the 1911 map above, a little less than a mile north of Wysock is a small village named Kol. Sofijskaja, which is the same as Schrag’s Zofyovka.

If we are correct to correlate Schrag and the Rovno registers as describing the same migration, then this is no doubt the village where Benjamin and Helena settled and in which David Buller was born in early 1818. This is when and where our family’s Russian residency began.

Note

* Presumably Schrag provides his evidence and sources in the master’s thesis (Schrag 1956) on which the GAMEO article is based. To my knowledge, he did not have access to the Rovno registers, which apparently were uncovered decades after his thesis. The fact that he used sources other than the Rovno registers probably accounts for the differences between the lists. In addition, Schrag dates the period of migration of his twenty-one families to 1806–1818, whereas the Rovno lists begin in 1810 and extend through 1819 (Rovno 2). The varying time frame might also explain some differences between the sources.

Sources

Schrag, Martin H. 1956. European History of the Swiss-Volhynian Mennonite Ancestors of Mennonites Now Living in Kansas and South Dakota. Master’s thesis, Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Revised and published as The European History (1525–1874) of the Swiss Mennonites from Volhynia. Mennonite Centennial Series. North Newton, KS: Swiss Mennonite Cultural & Historical Association, 1974. 2nd ed. North Newton, KS: H..J. Stucky, 1999.

———. 1959. Volhynia (Ukraine). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available online here.