Heinrichsdorf history 6

A follow-blown comparison between the 1850 census and the 1858 church book will take time, but we can gain a sense of the big picture even now. As mentioned earlier, the 1850 census presents the residents of Heinrichsdorf according to thirty-one family groups.

The church book adopts the same numbering scheme in its listing of people within the church. We noticed this when we examined the entries for the Benjamin Buller family, who was family 22 in the census and in the book. The church book includes the numbers when it lists toward the front of the book all the families that follow in a rough table of contents. So, even without looking through all the individual names entered in the book, we can gain a rough sense of which families from the census are still in the church (community) and which have already left.

The scan to the right shows the first of two pages of contents. Families 19–31 appear on the following page. Looking closely, we can already see that there are gaps in numbering, each gap indicating that that family no longer resides at Heinrichsdorf.

All told, ten of the 1850 census’s thirty-one families are missing from the 1858 church book. To be clear, ten of the thirty-one are entirely absent from the church book. Essentially a third of Heinrichsdorf’s original families no longer lived there less than a decade after the village was founded.

These families included the following (heads of household only):

3. Benjamin Ratzlaff
4. Jacob Buller
5. Jacob Georg Buller
9. Benjamin Heinrich Unruh
13. Samuel Böse
14. Benjamin Janz
16. Jacob Funk
23. David Heinrich Köhn
25. Anna Worbel
26. Jacob Pankratz

These ten families accounted for 69 of Heinrichdorf’s 273 1850 residents, so one might expect that at least 25 percent of the population left before 1858.

However, the number was no doubt higher. As we have already seen, some of the family groups that stayed had some family members leave during this same period. The Benjamin Buller family, for example, had two sons stay (Heinrich, Peter) and one son leave (our ancestor David). This was a net loss of five people for the larger family. No doubt other families experienced the same.

We will not know with any degree of accuracy the number who left until we do a full accounting of the church book in comparison to the 1850 census. We should not be surprised, however, if 30 to 40 percent of the church left within its first decade. Nor should we be shocked to discover that this trend continued for the next decade or more, since it seems that the group who emigrated to North America in 1874 was significantly smaller than Heinrichsdorf had been when it was initially founded.