Waldheim settlers 3

Now that we have considered the 1840 list on its own terms, both as a witness to our own family history and as a source for identifying some of the original settlers in Waldheim, we are ready to consider how the list relates to other Waldheim historical material known to us. As earlier (see here), this involves comparing the data contained in the list of settlers with the historical account provided by the 1848 Gemeindebericht, or community report.

If you recall, the Gemeindebericht begins with two sentences on Waldheim’s establishment:

This village was founded in 1836. That year eight landowners settled in it, twelve in the year 1838, and twenty landowners in 1840.

We already modified the account to accord with the evidence from the 1839 list (changes in bold):

This village was founded in 1838. That year eight landowners settled in it, thirteen in the year 1839, and nineteen [?] landowners in 1840.

The question mark accompanying the last change was intentional. In fact, the community report’s assumption that all forty Wirtschaften were assigned by the end of 1840, the assumption that led to the suggestion of nineteen landowners in 1840 (i.e., 8 in 1838 + 13 in 1839 + 19 in 1840 = 40) seems to be incorrect.

How can we know this? Look at the 1840 list here. Only seventeen names are listed for all of 1840. The Gemeindebericht was thus mistaken on two more points: (1) only seventeen landowners settled in 1840, and only thirty-eight total settled in the years 1838–1840 (i.e., 8 + 13 + 17 = 38). In light of all this, the Gemeindebericht requires further revision:

This village was founded in 1838. That year eight landowners settled in it, thirteen in the year 1839, and seventeen landowners in 1840. It appears the final two Wirschaften were assigned after 1840.

One might wonder how officials got so many facts wrong a mere decade after the village’s founding. In all likelihood, the village officials did not have access to the government records available to us (they were not kept in the village), and they relied on people’s memories instead—and the simple truth is that memory is not as reliable as we like to think. Memory is especially unreliable when we are recounting things that happened not to ourselves but to others—which is precisly what happened with Waldheim: many original settlers headed back to Volhynia after a few years, leaving a mix of newcomers and oldtimers to piece together the village history. Consequently, it is no surprise that the Gemeindebericht is mistaken in a number of its details, even as it recalls correctly that there were eight original settlers and three waves of settlement during the early years.

All that to say that, although we should correct the Gemeindebericht as more reliable information comes to light, we should not criticize it for not having access to the same documents that are now before us, thanks to the efforts of today’s Mennonite researchers and historians.