Quick History and Big Dilemmas



I thought it would be appropriate to start off this blog with a quick history of the Volga-German group I'm examining.  On July 22, 1763, Tsar Katharine the Great issued a Manifesto to called for foreigners to travel to settle along the Volga River in Russia.  The area had a rich farm land was populated by serfs, which the Russian monarchy saw as backward and uneducated.  A common Russian tradition, since the time of Tsar Peter II wanted to make Russia more like Europe, going as far as to have the Russian leaders intermarrry with German ones (Katharine herself was of German dissent).  The settlers were promised tax-free land for a specific period of time, freedom to establish whatever churches they desired, autonomous rule (within the confines of Russian civil law), and waivering the requirement for men to enlist in the Russian miliary (only for infrastructure projects).

Between 1764-1767, nearly 20,000 settlers arrived.  The settlers found grueling hardships when they arrived.  The Russian government did not keep its promise of autonomous rule and enforced strict regulations on the settlers.  In addition, timber for houses was difficult to aquire and raids by raiders and Mongol forces were a problem.  Eventually, the German settlers adapted to the conditions.  By 1767, there were 104 various religious colonies.  The colonists mostly kept to themselves and continued to speak German, acquiring some Russian words to interact with the authorities.  The religious groups that came were Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Mennonite, Russian Orthodox, and Seven-Day Adventists.  After about a century of living in the Volga Region, the Russian monarchy started to change teh governing structure of the region, adding the Zemstvos (a district governing body that the settlers felt did not represent minorities well), started to tax the land, and, in January 1874, Tsar Alexander II forced the German settlers to enlist in the army. 

To escape these problems, the German settlers searched for land that looked promising.  This included the Midwestern United States, Argentina, and Brazil.  I'm looking at the Volga-Germans in Kansas.  This group left in summer of 1875 traveling to Saratov to Berlin to Baltimore to Topeka, Kansas.  They stayed in Topeka for the winter of 1875-1876 and traveled to Ellis County, Kansas in June 1876. Ellis County had very cheap land, only $3 an acre, and wide spaces to build various communities.  The group in Ellis County were predominantly Catholic and kept in very tight knit groups, speaking German as the main language in these communities. 

The critical problem with starting any project is how to begin the narrative?  How far back should one trace the roots of these settlers?  The landscape is quite complicated and not easy to decipher.  Much of the secondary source literature, like books and essays, are poorly written with very little citations to verify the facts they cite.  Many of the other sources are either geneologies focusing on one one specific family or a local history book that is reprinted several times with stories passed down from generation-to-generation.  For this narrative, the story can be told by religious group, where the people came from in German states, or can even be broken down by individual families.  Just the short narrative I've provided cannot tell the whole story and all the reasons for traveling from German territory to Russia to the United States.