20 April 2017

Sorting Through Volga: New and Refreshed Maps

Did I mention this is a work in progress?

There has been a lot of re-checking of maps and editing data going on behind the scenes lately that will continue for months to come. Dennis has gone through the village data against the paper maps, and I've been following behind validating, editing and making notes before updating the online maps. And in doing so, I discovered we had some information that was incorrectly categorized.  

The Volga map had more villages that were actually in the official Volga region as defined by the governorate, so those have been pulled out into two new maps: the Samara Colonies and the Ural Colonies.  

Samara was indeed the Volga region, so it remains there on the full GRSL map and the Volga Region map, but those who settled the colonies came much later and from different places than the original Volga colonists. They deserve their own colony group.  The Ural colonies are east and northeast of the Volga colonies and west of the Ural Mountains.  They include the Neu-Samara Mennonites, the Orenburg Mennonite and Protestants colonies, the Ufa colonies (Catholic, Mennonite, Protestant), the Aktyubinsk colonies founded on privately bought land by Black Sea and Volga colonists and the Arkadak Mennonite settlement. 

The following online maps are now available: 

Volga Colonies (data refresh)
Samara Colonies (new)
Volga Region (new)
Ural Colonies (new)
GRSL (Germans from Russia Settlement Locations) map (data refresh)

For the Volga region (Volga and Samara), the following paper maps were used for village locations: 

  • Karte der deutschen Siedlungen im Wolgagebiet (Map of the German settlements in the Volga Region). Karl Stumpp, AHSGR, Landsmannschaft der Deutschen aus Russland, 1954. WorldCat link.
  • Karte der deutschen Siedlungen im Raum Alt-Samara, Ufa-Dawlekanowo, Orenburg, Neu-Samara und Aktjubinsk (Map of German settlements in the area of Alt-Samara, Ufa-Dawlekanowo, Orenburg, New Samara and Aktjubinsk). Karl Stumpp and AHSGR, 1964. WorldCat link.
  • Carte des colonies Allemandes etables sur le Volga dans le territoire de Saratov (Map of the German colonies on the Volga in the territory of Saratov). Pierre François Tardieu, 1788.
And for the Ural colonies, the Map of German settlements in the area of Alt-Samara, Ufa-Dawlekanowo, Orenburg, New Samara and Aktjubinsk was also used.

The paper maps used to find the villages are available for purchase from the American Heritage Society of Germans from Russia.  Copyright prevents sharing them in full here.  If you want a copy of a map for your family archive, note the map used in the Sources for your village. There are also many other maps of the Volga out on the internet.  Finally, the OCLC WorldCat link is provided so you can find the nearest library with a copy of the two Stumpp maps, if you'd just like to look at them.


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18 April 2017

Layout of German Dorfs in Russia Part II

While editing the latest batch of colony data, I ran across a couple of really nice examples of how farmsteads must've looked back when our ancestors lived in Russia...because they still look like it today.

For a refresher of how German colonies were laid out, see a previous post from November last year on the Layout of German Dorfs in Russia.  Take a look at the drawings for the farmyards and then take a look at of the photos below.

These are Mennonite colonies the Orenburg oblast (map coming soon).

Kuterija, Orenberg, Russia


Jugowka, Orenberg, Russia

Klinok, Orenburg, Russia

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05 April 2017

Number of Villages by Current Country - No Map

This evening while contemplating a new map laying out the villages by their current countries, I jotted down the count per country so far. 


Current CountryNumber of Villages
Azerbaijan 9
Bulgaria 5
Georgia 20
Kazakhstan 2
Moldova 76
Poland 120
Romania 39
Russia 523
Ukraine 2,346


That last number – Ukraine, 2,346 – exceeds the 2000 limit of pins that can be put into a group on a Google map.  So....I guess I won't be creating a new map, but I thought I'd share the numbers anyway. 

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04 April 2017

Map Refresh: Crimea, Galizien, Kherson, Kronau, Schwedengebiet, Taurien, Volga, Zagradovka

With spring arriving (northern hemisphere), there has been a lot of reviewing of maps and data clean up and standardization going on the past couple months.

For those who were aware of this project a year ago, you might recall a document with a list of changes that kept track of the progress of village locates. That has been started up again to keep track of all the moving parts and for those who are interested in the details of what additions and updates occur with the data used to create the maps. You can access the change history file off the Maps page.

This week there are several colony group map refreshes:


The Black Sea Area map has been updated with the changes for Crimea, Kherson, Kronau, Schwedengebiet, Taurien and Zagradovka. And the full Germans from Russia Settlement Locations map has been updated with all the changes. 

Current total village count: 3140



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