 I'd just like to give a little background. My Volga German ancestry comes from my great grandparents who were married in Russia in 1903 and came to this country in 1907. They first settled in Green Lake County where my great-grandfather worked on the Lausonia golf course doing groundskeeping. And then they went for a season out to the Great Plains and worked in the wheat harvest out there. My great-grandmother didn't really like that, so they came back to Wisconsin and settled in Oshkosh, where my great-grandfather worked at the paint lumber company. And that is where quite a few of their children worked. One of his daughters actually came to Sheboygan for a brief time. It was a bookkeeper at the Phoenix Chair Company. So that's my one connection of the Volga German community here in Sheboygan. Through this presentation, I'm going to give an overview of the history of the Volga Germans and how they came to end up in Russia and then eventually how they came to America. So there was a royal marriage in 1745, and this is really the event that led to our ancestors going to Russia. Princess Sophia von Anhaltzerst married Grand Duke Peter of Russia. Peter's aunt at the time was the, Elizabeth was the Empress of Russia. Princess Sophia was a German princess and went to Russia. She quickly learned Russian and converted to the Russian Orthodox faith and took the name Catherine. In 1762, the Empress Elizabeth died, and her nephew Peter III was crowned the emperor. And he was not very popular with the aristocracy in Russia. So he became Lazar on the 5th of January and the 9th of July. He was overgrown, and eight days later was murdered. Catherine and Peter did not have the greatest marriage, and she had taken up as a lover Count Gregory Orloff who masterminded the coup that overthrew Peter. Catherine became the Empress of Russia at age 33, and she was to rule Russia for the next 34 years. For those who are interested in knowing more about Catherine, I recommend either of these books. The first one is Catherine the Great by Robert Massey, who has written quite a bit on the Romanov dynasty. And then the book Catherine by Segrit Wiedenweber is more from a Volga German point of view. It's historical fiction. But she really tries to stay true to the historical facts. And so that would be another book. The Massey book I know is at the Meade Library here, so that's where I checked it out when I read it. Very shortly after coming to the throne, Catherine turned her attention to the settlement of the Eastern Frontier in Russia. This was land that was sparsely populated, and she wanted to bring settlers there to essentially tame the frontier. So in 1762, the Russian government issued a manifesto that was distributed throughout Europe. And it was supposed to attract settlers, but it didn't have much for detail as to the conditions that they would immigrate under. And very few people responded. So in 1763, they revisited it and made a lot of promises to the potential colonists. They promised freedom of religion for Christians who do not proselytize, exemption from taxation for 30 years, 0% loans for a period of 10 years, exemption from being conscripted into the military, rations and free transport to their destinations, rights were to extend to their descendants, and they had the freedom or were promised the freedom to settle anywhere in the Russian Empire. So the reason that so many people responded to this were the conditions in Central Europe, especially in the Western part of Germany. We had just generations of destructive warfare, the 30 years war and the seven years war, but the seven years war just ending at the time the proclamation was issued. And their rights that they were promised were really attractive because these people didn't have freedom of religion. There was the places they lived had state religion, so you were either supposed to be Catholic or some form of Protestant according to the ruler of your area. They were subject to compulsory military service and they had no realistic chance of owning their own land but worked for the land and nobility in what was basically a feudal system. This map shows where they came from. So largely from this part of Germany and some from Switzerland and the Alsace-Lorraine area of France, the red on the map indicates places they settled. So the large or more umbrella term Germans from Russia applies to all these German settlements. The people who came to Sheboygan and settled were the group known as the Volga Germans who settled in this area. The first settlements were in the Volga up here by St. Petersburg, which attracted largely professionals and trades people. And then a small settlement in the Ukraine here. These settlements all occurred in the early 1800s and down here in the Caucasus. These people are known as the Black Sea Germans. And a lot of those people went out to the Great Plains, especially in the Dakotas. Some resources on finding German origins of different families are a book by Trent May and Donna Reeves-Marcourt, German migration to the Russian Volga. And then the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia has a German origins project on their website. And you can find a surname you're interested in. And they keep that up to date with the latest research as to where in Germany or where else in Europe the family name came from. And then also there's a Volga German Institute and the Center for Volga German Studies. Also have websites on that subject. The colonists came in a short period of 1763 through 1766. This graph here shows the number of colonists coming in each of those years. So it's 1766, it just boomed. And actually overwhelmed the Russian government's ability to transport people. And so they had to contract with a lot of private shippers to bring people to Russia. So the people coming from Europe made their way to the German port of Lubeck for the most part. And there they took passage on ships and were transported through the Baltic up to Oranienbaum, which is a small town outside of St. Petersburg where Catherine had a palace. And that was kind of like their Ellis Island. The people were received there. Their names were taken along with some information about where they came from, what their occupations were. And from there it would then be decided where they would be settled. Two books document this part of their migration. Igor Pleve has a book called Lists of Colonists to Russia in 1766, which is translations of passenger lists. The cover is a little scary because it's all in Russian, but the inside is in English. And then Georg Rauschenbach's book Aus Wanderung, Deutscher Colonisten, Nack Russel, Demiara, Siebzein Hundrit, Sex and Sexy. That is in Russian and German. It makes some corrections to Mr. Pleve's book and has some additional information about the ships that took the colonists to Russia. The migration was organized by what was known as the contour, which comes from an acronym for the organization, which is called the Office of Guardianship of Foreign Settlers. Count Gregory Orloff, who masterminded the coup that brought Catherine to power, was in charge of this, which really shows how much of a priority this was to her government that she put her favorite in charge and that this was initiated so soon after she came to power. The contour had an office in Saratov, which is a large town on the Volga. And that was kind of where the center of all the settlement activities took place. And that office helped them settle. It arranged for the shipment of lumber to build houses. It also controlled if they wanted to move from one place to another. And what they found is the first right they were promised, the freedom to settle anywhere in the Russian Empire, was the first one to go. As soon as they were in Russia, the Russian government knew where they wanted them. And they wanted them as farmers on the Volga. And that's where they put the vast majority of them. So you had people who maybe were craftsmen that immigrated and maybe thought they were going to settle in a city and pursue their trade. And they ended up down on the Volga River as farmers. The contour made changes to their rights. They had their status changed from colonists to settler landowners. And it was a legal definition that really took away that right to settle wherever they wanted to. The contour office controlled Volga German life until 1876 when it was disbanded. The process of going from Iranian bound to the Volga took a year. They generally, they boarded river boats and came down this river and then crossed overland to this one and then took this over to the Volga and down. And then there was a more northerly route that went kind of off the map and connected with Volga here. This overland route that it shows here was really used only in the first couple of years that settlers came. So if your settlers came to Russia in the 1766 to 67 period, which most, you know, the vast majority did, then they took this combination river and land route. During the winter, they were actually, when the Volga froze up, they were quartered with Russian peasants. And the Russian peasants were then reimbursed for any food that they, the food and lodging they supplied to the colonists. This phase of their journey is documented in a couple works. Brent Mai has a book called Transport of the Volga Germans from Iranian bound to the colonies on the Volga. It's really just a list of the, in the archives, they found lists of the colonists that were transported under the charge of different military officers. And Brent translated these. And they have some notes about people who died along the way. And then Georg Rauschenbach as Deutsche Colonisten auf dem Weg von St. Petersburg nach Saratov. And he provides a lot more context to the story of this part of their migration. Again, his books in German and Russian, so you need to know one or the other to get that part of the story out of it. But it's quite an interesting tale of how they managed to transport people into the heart of Russia. The geography of the region is distinguished by the sides of the Volga that people lived on. On the west side, this was called the Bear Saita, which means the hillside. So here's the Volga River. And this is the hillside. There's bluffs that go down to the river. And when you go inland, it's more of an upland that has had rivers and streams cut into the valleys into the landscape. The east side is called the Bezen Saita, which is the meadow side. And it's flat. So that's this side. There's very, any elevation here is very slight. This side is also much more dry. Some of the rivers on this side would dry up in the summer. The majority of the people who ended up in Sheboygan came from a group of villages along here, which this river is called the Karaman. Reinwald, Schaefer, being the two biggest contributors to Sheboygan's population of Volga Germans. This is Mappo, Wisconsin, with what in the 1920s was called the Volga German Autonomous Republic. And talk about that a little bit more. So that is this yellowish part. The red outline is what is shown on this big map here. Some of the Volga German settlements weren't in the Autonomous Republic. There's up here is Yagadaina, Pollyanna, which had a lot of people go to Oshkosh. And it was kind of an outlier of the Volga German villages. When they first came, the west side was mostly inhabited by nomadic Kyrgyz tribesmen. And in the first years of the settlement, they actually raided and destroyed some villages and carried people away as captives. And they either were killed or sold into slavery. And a few of the villages that they had done this to just were abandoned and never rebuilt. Another thing that happened in the early history was a man named Kugachev emerged out of nowhere claiming to be Catherine's husband, saying he didn't really die. And he raised a peasant army and tried to take the Russian crown. And during the final campaign of when he was pursued by the Russian army, he came and he burned the contour office in Saratov. And then he swept down this road and basically looted villages as he went down. And several months later, he was actually captured and executed and that ended his revolt. The impact on our people was just this memory combined with that of the Kyrgyz of these early days being turmoil and hardships that they thought they were getting away from when they left Germany and central Europe. And that also a lot of records were lost when they burned and looted the contour office. When I first thought of even trying to find anything about my family in Russia, it just seemed like a mysterious black hole. And I had no idea what records they even created there. But it turns out they actually created a lot of interesting records that enable you if you can trace back maybe just even one or two generations into Russia that you could end up going all the way back to the original colonists. They created what was called revision lists. These were based on a census that was taken during Peter the Great's rule to essentially divide land up. And for the Volga German villages, this was very important to you. The land was held communally in the villages. And it got apportioned to each family based on how many males were in the family. Which kind of when I learned about this, it made me realize why my great-grandma always preferred boys to the girls in the family. Economically, they were more important because that's how you got your proportion of the farmland assigned to the village. So there's actually lists of these from 1775. That's only kind of a partial list. There's the 1798 list, which is complete or mostly complete. We actually have these books in the back. And so this is essentially a census, like we're used to where it lists all the head of the household and all the people in the household. It tells their relationships and their ages. This one else, the 1798 one in the translation has information on the crops grown in the villages. It has a little report that the Russian official did on the conditions in the village. One of the things, you can learn things like some of them had infestations of gophers after destroying the crops that happened in my ancestral village. And just different conditions of life in the villages. These revisions were done up to 1857. And there's two big gaps in the records. The third one, which is done in 1767, it's called the first settlers list usually because that was when all the settlers should have been on the Volga. And so that would list the first families in the villages. There's a 31-year gap between that and the complete 1798 revision. And so you could have people who came here and they died before this time. And you don't, and any children they had in between here, you don't really have connected to the parents by any records. This also occurs between 1798 and 1834. So you generally hope, like in 1834, if your ancestor is married and has children, that they were a child born before 1798. Otherwise, you would be hard pressed to connect them back. The 1834, the 1850, and 57 censuses are pretty easy to get also. Brent Mai and the AHSGR have translated a lot of them. Some of them are available. Actually, some of them are online now through the LDS Family History Library. Those are actually copies of the original, so you have to be able to read Hand Written Russian. So the translations are much more convenient. And Brent Mai has a document that lists the ones he's translated and that are for sale. And the AHSGR website also lists the ones that they have. The original colonies were allocated just so much land. And they tended to be hemmed in by each other and by Russian villages that were in the area. Each village was a fairly compact settlement. And it was surrounded by farmland. And that's a big difference. Here, we're kind of used to farmland being like you go out in the country and there's a farmhouse and you go a mile and there's a farmhouse. And that's because of how the public land was distributed in the United States, according to what was called the town range system. But in Europe, that didn't exist. So if some families, if you got farmland allocated that was quite a bit away from the village, you might spend half a day going out to the fields to work it. And then they'd usually just camp out in the fields to work it rather than losing the valuable time going back and forth. So part of the thing is, as the population grew, the land allotment shrank. And so essentially, the people would become land poor. And so they appealed to the Russian government because on the Abyssin site here, there was a lot of land that was vacant. And so they received permission to create what were called daughter colonies. So often, if you're reading about the Volga Germans, you'll read about mother colonies. Those were the original ones, which there was 102 of them. And then daughter colonies, which were formed usually in the 1850s when people moved more over into the Abyssin site to form these new villages and acquire new land. Also in the mid-1800s, there was Mennonite group that came. They settled in this area on the Abyssin site. They came from East Prussia. They came to be able to have religious freedom. And so between 1855 and 1875, they settled on the Abyssin site. At a later point, they started to be persecuted in Russia also. And they were one of the first German-Russian groups to decide to come to the United States. These two czars really presided over our ancestors' loss of their rights under the original manifesto. Alexander II, who ruled from 1855 to 81, was known as the czar liberator because he freed the Russian serfs from bondage to their aristocratic masters. These people were essentially slaves. And when he freed them, this created more pressure for them to acquire land because they could now. And some of them moved to the Abyssin site and founded villages. The contour was closed. So in the past, while it was a very controlling organization, it also advocated for the settlers. And so when they closed it, they didn't have this governmental body to essentially appeal to. Alexander also ended the military service exemption in 1871. And in 1874, the first full of German men were drafted. Alexander was assassinated in 1881. And his son Alexander III became czar. And he had a policy known as Russification. And this policy was aiming at making all the people that lived in Russia Russians. Russia has a vast amount of minority groups that largely retain their own culture, language. And so this affected many people, not just the Germans in Russia. But some of it was very much directed at Germans. So there was a promotion of anti-German sentiment by what were known as pan-Slavic intellectuals. These were people who were trying to promote Slavic culture and say, this is our culture. This is what people that live here need to be following. There was an interference with local school curriculum. Before the German churches were able to run the schools and their villages and decide their own curriculum. And the Russian government at this time said, well, you've got to start teaching these children Russian and then make other changes to the curriculum. And this was all aimed at assimilating the people into the Russian population. Having been there for over 100 years now, they never assimilated. And they had really no intention to. Also in this era, because of the land allotments shrinking, and the land was depleted of organic properties because they didn't really practice crop rotation. There were major, there was crop failure in 1879 to 81, and then droughts in 1885, 1889, 1892, and 1898. So they were really hit hard at the end of the 19th century. This period, as far as genealogy is concerned, is usually documented in what were called personal lists or family lists. And those were essentially a village-level census. And it was supposed to originally created in Lutheran villages to track who had taken communion. These are usually, if these exist for your villages, that's usually where you will find the people that actually came to the United States. The difference between these in a census is they added information over time. So you have births of children added in over time, deaths and other events. And the American Historical Society of Germans for Russia have been acquiring and translating these lists. You can also get extracts from them from the Russian archives also. These are going to be some papers that your ancestors might have brought from Russia. This is a military discharge paper. And it has just the details of the military service, where they were drafted from, and other notations on their service. It's interesting, too, this particular document is my great-grandfathers. And while his name was Johann Georg, they actually called him Johann Davidovich. And Davidovich, meaning the son of David. So because they used that Russian patronomic middle name, then we knew that his dad's name was David. In 1874 to 1880, about one third of the Mennonites that had settled in the Volga area emigrated, they largely went to Kansas and the Great Plains. In 1874, this group of men were part of a delegation that the Volga colonists sent to take a look at the United States and identify places they might want to relocate to. And they came back with a very positive report. Brazil and Argentina were also locations. And even some of the people that settled in Wisconsin first went to Brazil or Argentina and maybe went back to Russia and then came here or just went directly to the United States from South America. Those governments were looking for hardworking settlers and they subsidized the immigration and settlement. Argentina was much more to the liking of the Volga Germans, so that settlement really thrived. So there is still a lot of Volga German descendants in Argentina. The first immigrants went to Brazil in 1877. Others went to Argentina. And after 1889, then Argentina was preferred destination. This is a document that a lot of families would bring with them. This is a parish certificate when they were leaving. The minister or priest would write up this document, which lists everybody in the household. Their dates of birth and the place of birth, when they were confirmed, when they were married. This one over here has a note as to why they're leaving the parish. It says they're leaving for America. This one is written in Russian. We have one on display from Anne Lautenschlager's family that was written in German. So it just depends on which language the pastor felt like using. Another thing that they would have brought would be a passport. The passport will indicate where it was issued. We'll have stamps for when they left Russia. A lot of people left from the port of Levow. So that's a common notation to find in a Volga German passport. This section here indicates the head of the household the passport was issued to, and then his family has his wife and children. The pages in here are written in Russian, in German, and in French. So the names will actually have their forms in Russian, in French. For those who remain, life was very hard. The 1904 to 1905 Russo-Japanese War involved many Volga German men who were drafted into the army or had gone into the reserves and were called back into service. And then World War I was a disaster for Russia. They were very badly defeated and essentially that caused the government to fall, leading to the Russian Revolution. And then Civil War until 1922. Some of the people in the Volga German colonies were executed during the Civil War time for resisting the communists. In the village that my great grandma came from, there exists a list of men who were arrested and executed. And a bunch of people with her family name are on that list. And that really doesn't surprise me since that family is very opinionated and spoke their minds. During the end of the Civil War, a famine broke out in Russia. And the Volga Relief Society was formed by Volga Germans in the United States to assist. The American Relief Administration was a government agency that would ship supplies and food to Russia. And so the Volga Relief Society worked through that agency to try to help their family members that stayed in Russia. In 1932 and 1933, there was another famine that was largely brought on by the communists' collectivization of farms. And the communists were largely from an industrial, the industrial workers. They didn't really understand agriculture. And so their government policies were quite disastrous for the farmers in Russia. And from 1918 to 1941, they had their own state under the Soviet government called the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. And so this is a map of that area. It contained almost all the Volga colonies. In 1941, with the invasion of Russia by Germany, Joseph Stalin decided that these Germans that were in the path of the invasion needed to be removed, suspecting that they might help the German army. There's really no indication that that even would have been the case. But he had them deported to Siberia. And it was essentially one day they just show up the village and you've given a small amount of time together some belongings and put on boxcars and shipped out to Siberia and have to start all over again. And that's, even now, there are very few Germans in the Volga German area. There are a lot of them in Siberia, that's where they remained. And it was only in recent years that they even had the freedom to move back to the Volga. But they just really didn't have a connection anymore to that region. And this is my final slide on Volga Germans in Sheboygan. So the first Volga Germans came in 1892. By 1930, there were 550 Volga German families here. 230 from Reinwald and 170 from Schaefer. So those two villages make up the majority of the Volga Germans that came to Sheboygan. Kohler Company became the largest employer, but others worked at the chair factories, Volrath, a garden toy, and what's called the hand-knit closurey company. In the summer of the first several years that they were in the United States, they would sometimes go down to Racine County or out to Michigan and work in the sugar beet fields. And the whole family would work in the fields. The little shaded areas are Volga German households. And this is a pattern that shows up in other Wisconsin cities, where they really cluster in a small area. So this is Erie between 8th and the bend in the river, which became known as Russian Boulevard, informally. And to me, this was a way of their recreating their village life. When they were on the Great Plains with the farmsteads spread out, they didn't have that village life or it was very hard to create. But in the cities, they could settle in a small part of the city, essentially preserve that village life and go to the same church and have other social activities and hang on to their culture. Once their children started intermarrying with a population outside the Volga German community, then you're going to see that disappearing. My grandpa was born in the United States. He didn't want to be German. He wanted to be American. We would get scolded if we said, yeah. And so he was one of that. And then he married a lady who was from English and Dutch ancestry and her ancestors have been in this country since the 1600s. And you see that. And you see the recent immigrants marrying into families that had been in the United States for a longer period of time and then just assimilating. And so the importance, to me, of gathering like this to learn about this history is to kind of reclaim some of what's been lost, to be able to talk to the people who still remember their older relatives who passed on stories of the old country and their experience coming to the United States. And to me, it's a heritage that is full of drama and adventure. And they led very hard lives, but they were also hardworking and faithful people that really did what Catherine wanted them to do. They created a viable agricultural area on the World Cup where the wilderness had been before they were suffering.