Needle in a Haystack

AHSGR, Work Paper No. 9, October 1972

Genealogical Records On The Volga Germans
By Harm H. Schlomer

(Excerpts)
(Page 49)
In the years before World War I, Volga Gemran emigration lists were on file in Moscow and Saratov, but very few of our grandparents took the trouble to consult them. Needless to say, all of us fervently hope that these emigration lists still exist somewhere in the Soviet Union. They constitute the most important source of information on our background. Archives in Germany merely give us the names of perhaps 25% of the families who left for the Volga in the 1760’s. Such material does not tell in what colony these people settled….

…I found an extremely interesting document, dated October 30, 1766, in the library of Büdingen Castle. It was a report sent to the count by a court official notifying him that twenty of his subjects from the village of Düdelsheim and five from the village of Rohrbach had emigrated to Russia after paying off all their debts and taxes. Many of the names of these people sounded so familiar to me that I compared them with the names given by Jacob Volz for the colony of Balzer. In this manner I discovered that twelve families from Düdelsheim, including people named Bender, Calus, Eurich and Scheidt, as well as two from Rohrbach named Grassmück and Weber, had all arrived in Balzer in the summer months of 1767. In orther words, their place of origin was not the town of Isenburg but instead two small village [sic] in the “Grafschaft” or earldom of Isenburg- Büdingen….

Most of the names in the Stumpp Emigration Lists come from German sources…

…Those of us with such common German names as Müller, Schmidt, Becker, Koch and Weber will have the most difficult time of all. Dozens of people with these names will appear in the emigration lists. On the other hand, some Volga German family names are very unusual….