Annotated List of Chortitza Colony Householders for 1847

State Archives of the Odessa Region
Fond 6 Inventory 2 File 11519

Transcribed by

Below is a list of male heads of households in the villages of the Chortitza colony for December 1847. This list was transcribed from the original signatures of these men. The villages covered (number of households in parentheses) are Blumengart (31), Burwalde (47), Chortitz (52), Einlage (69), Insel Chortitz (25), Kronsthal (33), Kronsweide (51), Neuenburg (36), Neuendorf (36), Neuhorst (37), Nieder Chortitz (74), Osterwick (66), Rosengart (41), Rosenthal (45), Schoeneberg (33), Schoenhorst (69) and Schoenwiese (24). The source of this material is File #11519 of the Fond 6 Inventory 2 of the Odessa State Archives. Material related to Mennonites from Fond 6 Inventory 2 is available on microfilm from several different Mennonite archives in North America.

While Fond 6 Inventory 1 of the Odessa State Archives contains a tremendous amount of genealogical material from the early years of the Chortitza Colony (1801 - 1814) such as village censuses and vital records of births, marriages and deaths, much less is presently available for the mid 1800's. To my knowledge all we presently have from the period from the 1820's to the 1870's is the 1858 village census of Schoenwiese and the church records of the village of Schoenhorst (started in the 1870's). This makes file #11519 an important document, despite the fact that it contains no genealogical information beyond the names of the male heads of households. Nevertheless this is better that having a voters list, which would provide only the names of those heads of households who were landowners.

This list contains the signatures of 796 men. I was unable to completely transcribe 16 of these. According to the Gemeindeberichte of 1848, http://www.odessa3.org/collections/history/link/chortiza.txt, there were 460 farms (hence landowners) and 673 landless families with a total of 7,217 people in the Chortitza Colony. If one excludes the village of Kronsgarten (15 farms), which is not included in the 1848 list, there were 445 landowners, about 650 landless families and about 7,000 people. The total number of families is therefore about 1105. As one can see from the list below only 796 of these were classified as householders, leaving approximately 310 unlisted, landless family heads. Therefore if you are unable to find the name of a man you know to have been the head of a Chortitza Colony family in 1847 in this list, he was likely landless and classified as belonging to another household. This was not uncommon among the Mennonites in Russia as can be seen in the Molotschna Colony census of 1835 and the Schoenwiese census of 1858.

The names provided below are direct transcriptions of the original signatures and, as one can see, there are many variations in the signing of some family names. For example the name commonly spelled as Dyck or Dueck in North America has the following variations: Dick, Diek (I have also seen this variation in Prussian records), Dik, Dueck, Duk, Dück, Dük, Dyck, Dÿck, Dyk, and Dÿk, the most common being Dÿck and Dück. I found it interesting that the variations de Veer, d. Veer, deFehr, and Veer are found but not one person signed their name Fehr, the most common variation of the name in North America!

This posting will be updated in the future. If you find errors in my transcription, have information that you would like to add to my annotations or if you have the names of heads of households that are not found in this list, please contact me. At present I have compiled a list of 75 names that I cannot identify in the householders list (still a long way from the 310 missing families).

Update of Jan. 26, 2002: This major update includes much of the recently available data from the Chortitza Colony Church Registers. These church registers were started around 1900 and cover several of the Chortitza Colony villages. These registers will soon be available on a CD and have already been incorporated into the upcoming GRANDMA4 database.

This update also includes 1858 Chortitza Colony census information on those who later moved to the Yazykovo Colony. This information can be found at: http://www.mhsbc.com/genealogy/yazykovo/1858_census_for_yazykovo.htm. For example "1858#4" indicates that the family was household #4 living in that village in 1858. Unfortunately the actual 1858 census for these villages is still missing.

Update of January 18, 2007: This update contains a significant amount of new information added to the column of annotations, which has been collected over the last 5 years. Also, this version has columns of standardized surnames and standardized first names. The list is now arranged according to the standardized names in order to more easily find someone on the list.

The section of annotations may be confusing to some since I have attempted to pack as much information (and my own speculations) as possible into as small a space as possible. The annotation section includes (when available) the Grandma version 3 number for the household head, his birth-death years and name(s) of wife (wives). Please refer to the GMV3 database for more detailed information on the family. I was occasionally able to make speculative connections between these families and those families found in the book 1880 Village Census of the Mennonite West Reserve. Due to space and time limitations I have referred to the abbreviated village name/family number used in this book. For example, Nb04 refers to Bernhard Penner (1829-96) and his family who lived in Neuenburg, Manitoba in 1880 and can be found on pages 10,98,99 and 283 of the 1880 census book (according to new information he was the son of Heinrich Penner, who is listed below in Kronsthal). A complete list of village abbreviations can be found on page 6 of the 1880 census book. Some of the abbreviations I use below are: s = son, d = dau = daughter, child. = children, m = married and Mb. = Manitoba. I have also made some obvious abbreviations of wives' first names.

Updated 5 May 2012.

I would like to thank Margaret Kroeker of Winnipeg (Mennonite Genealogy Inc.) for very helpful suggestions on some of the hard to read signatures. I would also like to thank Tim Janzen (Portland, OR) for many additions to the annotations section.

HTML Editor's Note: As has been stated above, this page will be updated periodically. Thus, the html coding for this page is minimal and the appearance is not polished. A superior html file, along with a pdf version of the data, will be made available once the author is reasonably satisfied with the data.