Heinrichsdorf history 5

The primary historical sources that we have for Heinrichsdorf—the 1850 census and the 1858 church book—enable us to learn about this village not only at particular moments in time but also over the course of several decades, by comparing these particular moments with each other. Further, these source provide us the tools not only to discover the makeup of the community as a whole but also to trace the lives of the individual families who lived there.

The next posts in this series will touch on all these aspects of Heinrichsdorf’s history: the moment in  time and the historical trajectory of the broader community and its constituent families. We begin by looking into the data of the 1850 census, translated by Steve Fast (here).

1. Historical recap. As we learned earlier, Heinrichsdorf was not an existing village taken over by its Mennonite inhabitants but was rather a village newly founded by the group from Waldheim who had decided to return to Volhynia. They signaled their intent to return in 1845 and made the trip, it seems, in 1848, with the village being founded early in 1849 (see here). The 1850 census thus came only a year or, at most, two after the establishment of the village, which ensures that it provides an accurate picture of Heinrichsdorf in its earliest days.

2. Overview. Although the term village might evoke the image of a tiny hamlet, the census lists the names of 273 residents of Heinrichsdorf—a small town, to be sure, but more than a wide place in the road. These 273 residents were divided into thirty-one family groups, for an average of nearly nine people per family group. Many of the families no doubt lived in the same household under the same roof, but likely not all of them. We probably would not go wrong to imagine that Heinrichsdorf had perhaps thirty-five to forty households. One wonders if this village was organized like the villages in Molotschna and elsewhere, with houses arranged on both sides of a central road or street.

3. Demographics. Twenty family names are attested in the census, but six of them account for 192 out of the total 273 people.

• Funk: 37
• Schmidt: 33
• Unruh: 33
• Buller: 32
• Böse: 27
• Ratzlaff: 22

The other surnames in 1850 Heinrichsdorf were Teske (14), Voth (12), Nachtigal (10), Köhn (9), Schultz (8) Wedel (8), Janz (7), Pankratz (7), Ewert (5), Baltzer (2), Bayer (2), Franz (2), Klassen (2), Worbel (1). We have seen many of these surnames associated with each other in other historical documents. For example, the Przechowka church book includes sections for Wedel, Buller, Funck, Jantz, Köhn, Nachtigal, Pankratz, Ratzlaff, Schmidt, Unrau, and Voth. Similarly, the 1820 Rovno census included the names Buller, Nachtigal, Foth (= Voth), Beyer (= Bayer), Teske, Wedel, Köhn, Schmidt, and Pankratz. Obviously, these family groups had some sort of historical relation, or at least familiarity.

4. Demographics: gender. The 273 Heinrichsdorf residents included 144 males and 129 females, for a distribution of 52.7 percent males and 47.3 percent females.

5. Demographics: age. Given the large families that many Mennonites of that period had, one would expect a high percentage of children. Heinrichsdorf does not disappoint. What is particularly striking is how much of the population was so young. The table below shows the distribution for both genders and for the community as a whole.

ages	male total	male percent		female total	female percent		total	percent
0–17	81	56.3		64	49.6		145	53.1
18–35	30	20.8		36	27.9		66	24.2
36–60	23	16.0		20	15.5		43	15.8
61–	10	6.9		9	7.0		19	6.9
total	144		XX	129		XX	273

Clearly Heinrichsdorf was a young community by modern standards, with just over 77 percent of its population age thirty-five and younger. By comparison, the eighteen-and-under group accounted for 24 percent in the 2010 United States census. Whether this was young by nineteenth-century standards or in the Mennonite communities of that day remains to be seen.

If readers can think of any other questions they would ask of the data, please email me via the link at the top right of the blog. The next post will begin to compare the data from the census with that from the 1858 church book. We already know that some of the community left within Heinrichdorf’s first decade. We should be able to identify who left by comparing the census with the church book. What this will reveal is unknown, but the process of finding out should prove interesting and enjoyable.