The last few posts of this series (here, here, and here) filled in the three prior gaps in our identification of Alexanderwohl’s original landowners. If contradictory information arises at some point in the future, we will revise our list of the thirty original Wirtschaft settlers, but for now we can proceed under the assumption that we have an accurate list.
Of course, creating the list was not the entire goal of this exercise; now we want to look at it from various angles and perspectives so that we can develop a more complete understanding of the history of Alexanderwohl. We begin by comparing the 1848 Alexanderwohl Gemeindebericht (community report) with the details of the list, in order to discover the extent of their agreement.
The Gemeindebericht, as we read earlier, reported the founding and early settlement of the village as follows:
By 1821 twenty-two families from the Prussian Chief Magistrate’s District of Schwetz in the regency of Marienwerder were settled there, seven more in 1823 and one more in 1824.
Of course, 22 + 7 + 1 = 30 Wirtschaften settled. Does our list confirm or contradict this accounting of when the plots were settled? We previously arranged the list by Wirtschaft (see, e.g., here), but for the purposes of this examination it matters little which farmstead a family inhabited; more important is the year a family arrived in Molotschna colony and/or established a household, so that is how we will rearrange our list.
1819 Settlers
1819 Settlers
- Jacob David Schmidt
- Heinrich Peter Unrau
1820 Settlers
- Heinrich Jakob Buller
- Jacob Peter Buller
- Martin Jacob Kornelsen
- Andreas Jakob Nachtigal
- Jacob Jacob Pankratz
- Jacob Heinrich Ratzlaff
- Johann Peter Ratzlaff
- Andreas David Schmidt
- Andreas Peter Schmidt
- Heinrich David Schmidt
- David Peter Schroeder
- Heinrich Isaak Schroeder
- Johann Peter Schroeder
- David David Unrau
- David Johann Unrau
- Peter Johann Unrau
- David Bernhard Voth
- Jacob David Voth
- Peter Heinrich Voth
- Peter Jacob Voth
- Peter Benjamin Wedel
- Peter Christian Dalke
- Peter Benjamin Frey
- Jacob Jacob Buller
- Peter Johann Reimer
- Heinrich Jacob Schmidt
- Heinrich Peter Block
- Peter Franz Goerz
Before we compare the list and the Gemeindebericht directly, we should clarify several matters about the list. First, the two 1819 individuals (Jacob David Schmidt and Heinrich Peter Unrau) emigrated to Molotschna in 1819 but actually did not settle, according to the Russian records, until 1820, with the rest of the largest group of settlers. Therefore, we will count them among the 1820 group.
Second, although the official founding of Alexanderwohl took place in 1821, most of the earliest residents arrived in 1820. These 1820 settlers in our list are the same as the 1821 families referenced in the community report. They arrived in the last three months of 1820, received their government funding, and finished setting up their households, which presumably included building a combination house-barn, sometime in 1821. The Gemeindebericht labels them 1821 settlers because that was the year of the village’s birth.
With these clarifications in mind, we are ready to compare our settlement list with the reconstruction offered by the community report. It is obvious that the two sources agree in broad outline, with over two-thirds of the farmsteads settled during Alexanderwohl’s first year. However, just as we saw when we compared the Waldheim Gemeindebericht with contemporary records (see here), some of the details of the Gemeindebericht do not correspond to our independently created reconstruction.
For example, the compilers of the 1848 community report believed that twenty-two families settled in Alexanderwohl’s first year; in fact, there were at least twenty-three. Further, the community report claims that seven additional families settled in 1823, but our list has only one for that year but lists two for 1821 and three for 1822, to arrive at a total close to the community report’s. (We will return to the issue of the seven 1823 families in a subsequent post, since seven Alexanderwohl names also appear in Rempel 2007, 191.) The community report has the last family settling in 1824, our list in 1826.
That the two sources agree in broad terms should give us confidence that our general understanding of the founding of Alexanderwohl is secure. The main body of the residents arrived in Molotschna in 1820 and completed building their households during the following year. But what do we do about the disagreements with respect to the details?
Two plausible explanations come to mind: either we misinterpreted the settlement information at our disposal and created an inaccurate list, or the compilers of the community report misremembered the specifics of the village’s founding, even though they knew the general contours of that event.
In my view, the latter explanation is the more likely. Recall that the Gemeindebericht was written in 1848, twenty-seven years after Alexanderwohl’s founding. Without access to documentary records, the compilers of the report had to rely upon the village’s collective memory, which one would expect to be trustworthy on the general picture but prone to confuse or misremember various details.
They recalled, for example, that the last Wirtschaft was not claimed until after the earlier settlements but seemingly misdated that settlement by several years. Similarly, they knew that over twenty families settled the first year, but they misremembered the exact number and missed it by one. Yet again, they seemed to know that all but one of the Wirtschaften were settled by 1823 (i.e., the report’s 22 + 7), but they mistakenly compressed the settlements spanning three years into a single year: 1823.
What is the lesson we should learn from this? Although the Alexanderwohl Gemeindeberichte is broadly accurate, it is not a contemporary source, at least not as contemporary as the Russian settlement reports that Peter Rempel (2007) has compiled. The further removed any source is from the event that it purports to record, the greater the likelihood that the record will contain one or more errors, at least in terms of the specific details that it offers. We will see the same dynamic at work when we consider our list from another perspective, as we will do in the following post.
Work Cited
Rempel. Peter. 2007. Mennonite Migration to Russia, 1788–1828. Edited by Alfred H. Redekopp and Richard D. Thiessen. Winnepeg: Manitoba Mennonite Historical Society.
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