Waldheim settlers … and residents

An earlier post (Waldheim settlers 2) ended by suggesting that one might try to identify Waldheim’s first settlers, those eight individuals who founded the town before 1839 and 1840, by noticing which 1840 settlers were living with a relative who was already in Waldheim in 1838 (i.e., not on the 1839 list). We identified four possibilities:

• Peter Heinrich Nachtigal
• Kornelius Johann Funk
• Kornelius David Unruh
• Peter Tobias Sperling

Since that post we have been able to correlate the 1839 spring planting list with the 1839 and 1840 lists of settlers to determine beyond reasonable doubt the actual names of the first eight settlers:

• Michael Teske
• Peter Wedel
• Johann Worwel [Worbel]
• Peter Nachtigal
• Friedrich Kunkel
• Benjamin Ratzlaff
• Christian Teske
• Peter Sperling

A quick comparison of the two lists reveals that two on the first list (Peter Nachtigal, Peter Sperling) appear on the second list and two (Kornelius Funk, Kornelius Funk) do not. How are we to explain this inconsistency? Yet another document that we examined earlier may contain a hint.

The first document that we consulted in the Benjamin Buller series, “List of Mennonites Wishing to Leave Volhynia and Settle with Their Brethren in the Tauridian Governorate, 1833” (see here for the post and here for the original document) actually lists three of the men in the first list above: Peter Nachtigal, Kornelius (Cornelius) Funk, and Peter Sperling. If you look at the file, you will see that it lists each person’s occupation: Peter Nachtigal and Peter Sperling are landowners or farmers (Landwirt); Cornelius Funk is a linen weaver (Leinweber).

Why is this significant? If Cornelius Funk’s primary occupation was linen weaver—that is, he took harvested flax from farmers and spun and wove it into linen, perhaps just the latter—he had no need of a land allotment. He had no intent of ever farming as an occupation, so he became a resident of Waldheim in 1838 but not a settler then or, presumably, in the years that followed. The same may have been true of Kornelius Unruh, although we have no record of his occupation.*

There are two lessons to be learned here. First, we should not think of Waldheim as being populated in 1838 by only eight families of settlers; at least two additional families moved there at the same time. Second, we should use terminology carefully and precisely. I suggest that we refer to those who owned a Waldheim Wirtschaft as settlers; those who lived in Waldheim but did not own a Wirtschaft might better be described as residents of the village. Waldheim had both types from its earliest days; the presence of nonlanded residents was not a later development, although it became a problem within a few decades, when those who wanted to farm were unable to secure the necessary land to do so.


Note
* If Kornelius David Unruh is the same person as listed on the 1819 Ostrog census (see here), we may need to reconsider the question of where Waldheim’s first settlers originated. This will need to be the subject of a future post, but for now one wonders whether this small piece of evidence might further undermine Martin Schrag’s location of Ostrowka further to the west, in the Lutsk (Lusk) area.