30 March 2020

Russian America


“If [our] Government had given its attention to this part of the world earlier, if it had had proper respect for it, if it had persistently pursued the sagacious visions of Peter the Great, who with the small resources of his time dispatched [Vitus] Berings mapping expedition, one may be certain that New California would never have become a Spanish possession…” Nikolai P. Rezanov (1764-1807), promoter of Russian colonization of North America. 

                                                         From The Russian American Colonies 1798-1867.


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Timeline

1721 – Tsar Peter the Great declared the Russian Empire and himself Emperor of All of Russia.
1732 – The Russian Empire began to colonize the northern Pacific coast areas of North America in modern-day Alaska and parts of Northern California. The colonial Russian possessions were called Russian America.
1763 – Empress Catherine the Great issued her manifesto inviting foreigners to colonize her Empire. 
1776 – The U.S. Declaration of Independence was signed. By this time in Russia, Germans were known to be living in Orenburg, Astrakhan, and had founded Sarepta near Tsaritsyn (Volograd today), the Belowesh colonies and all of the Volga Mother colonies.

The Russian Discoveries from the Map Published by the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg. Circa 1775
Source: World Digital Library
.

This map, showing the known geography of Alaska in the late 18th century, was based on an original Russian map by Gerhard Friedrich Müller published in 1754 by the Imperial Academy of Saint Petersburg... Because the North Pacific and Arctic constituted the last largely unknown parts of the world at this time, early maps of Alaska were popular in Western Europe and were frequently reprinted. The map was published before the third Pacific voyage of Captain Cook to Alaska in 1778...


Timeline (cont.)

1784 – At the encouragement of Empress Catherine the Great, Russian fur trader Grigorii Ivanovich Shelikhov (1747–95) founded the first permanent Russian settlement in Alaska at Three Saints Bay on Kodiak Island. 

General Map Presenting the Convenient Methods of Increasing Russian Trade and Navigation
in the Pacific and Southern Oceans.
  1787.
Source: World Digital Library

This Russian map, published in 1787, centers on the Pacific Rim and includes much of Eurasia and North America on its margins. It was produced by Ivan Golikov, a Russian merchant who was one of the founders of the Russian-American Company active in the maritime fur trade in sea otter pelts in the North Pacific from the mid-18th century to the mid-19th century. The map displays, for the era in which it was made, a thoroughgoing level of knowledge of Alaska. It clearly incorporates cartographic insights gained from both the recent Russian explorations in the North Pacific since the voyage of Vitus Bering to Alaska in 1741 as well as the subsequent trading expeditions of the Russian-American Company along the Aleutian Islands and south-central Alaska...

Timeline (cont.)

1799 – Russian Emperor Paul I of Russia granted a charter to establish the Russian-American Company. The company kept detailed records of its work, finances, the fur trade, the movement of people from Russia to North America, company accomplishments, and, in some years, maps of new territories explored or new settlements established.  
1803 – The Louisiana Purchase from France doubled the size of the U.S. and opened up the young countrys westward expansion.  
1804 – Novo-Arkhangelsk (today Sitka, Alaska) was founded and became the Russian-American Company’s capital.  
1804 – Alta California or Nuevo California (New California) was established as a province of New Spain.  
1812 – The Russian-American Company established Fort Ross, a Russian outpost in northern Alta California (northern California today). It was inhabited from 1812-1842 and was the center of Russian colonial activity.  


Russian America souvenir card. 1856.
Source: World Digital Library

This card is one of a souvenir set of 82 illustrated cards–one for each province of the Russian Empire as it existed in 1856. Each card presents an overview of a particular province’s culture, history, economy, and geography. The front of the card depicts such distinguishing features as rivers, mountains, major cities, and chief industries. The back of each card contains a map of the province, the provincial seal, information about the population, and a picture of the local costume of the inhabitants. The territory depicted on this card corresponds to present-day Alaska.




From the Russian-American Company Report 1859.
Source: World Digital Library

“... Emperor Paul I of Russia granted a charter to establish the Russian-American Company... Although primarily a commercial entity, the Russian-American Company took on the responsibilities of Russian colonial government and became an outpost in the Pacific for the Imperial Court in Saint Petersburg....

Timeline (cont.)

1863 – The Homestead Act in the United States went into effect on January 1, 1863.
1867 – The United States purchased Alaska from Russian Emperor Alexander II on March 30, 1867.


Northwestern America Showing the Territory Ceded by Russia to the United States. 1867
Source: Library of Congress


Timeline (cont.)

1872 – Russian Emperor Alexander II revoked the Codex of the Colonists, making the German colonists subjects of Russia. Also that year, gold was discovered in Alaska. 
1873 – German colonists living Russia began emigrating from Russia to the United States, taking advantage of the Homestead Act to acquire land.  
1898 – Special legislation extended homesteading into the unincorporated U.S. territory of Alaska.  
1912 – Alaska Territory was established on May 17, 1912.  
1959 – Alaska became a state January 3, 1959. 
1958 – The first reported descendants of Germans from Russia resided in Seward, Alaska Territory, United States.  
2019 – According to the Germans from Russia in America Survey, at least five generations of descendants of Germans from Russia settled in Alaska at some point from the following regions: Bessarabia (Alt-Elft, Alt-Posttal, Hoffnungstal); Black Sea (Crimea, Bergdorf, Kassel, Neudorf, Elsass, Strassburg); Volga (Beideck, Frank, Kratzke, Saratov, Schäfer); and Volhynia (Karolinufka). 

Note: I've been collecting maps of Russian America for quite a while. Last summer, I happened upon the book The Russian American Colonies 1798-1867. To Siberia and Russian America. Three Centuries of Russian Eastward Expansion while browsing the stacks at the University of Arizona Libraries. From that book, an idea emerged of interspersing the history of the Russian Empire, the history of Germans from Russia and American history together in one timeline. Most of the maps come from the Library of Congress (LOC) and the World Digital Library (WLD), two of my favorite repositories for digitized primary documents.



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23 March 2020

Progress Report: Germans from Russia in America



Work continues on the Germans from Russia settlements in the U.S. The lower 48 are beginning to fill in nicely as you can see from the snapshot of the test map above.

Working from West to East, the last two full weeks have been on the largest division, the Midwest: West North Central states of Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.  A large number of places reported here were historical post offices, churches, cemeteries, schools and settlements that no longer exist. Fortunately, I had collected numerous sources over the past year to help out with what I knew was coming in this particular area. The last two weeks have included a fair amount of time converting legal land descriptions into coordinates and back again to find and confirm locations in township maps. While rural post offices were not marked on these maps (they came and went sometimes very quickly), churches, cemeteries and schools were. So I was working with a lot of tiny clues like the ones below.





The most challenging so far were the early Black Sea settlements (1872-73) in southeastern Dakota Territory (South Dakota today). For some reason, I thought these would be easy. A few were, but others all I had was a description of where it was from somewhere else. I ended up making a matrix of all the data known for each place to look at it all together as one unit. The bits of information spanned from 1879 to 2020, from maps of early Dakota postal routes, to county maps, to newspaper articles, to township maps, to Find a Grave. I'll write about the whole experience of finding them soon and share all the bits.

Currently, I'm recording the Hutterite colonies before I forget them. Bon Homme Colony (1874) was the first Hutterite colony in the Americas. There are about 130 Hutterite colonies in Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota and Washington, with many more in Canada (that's another map).

Here's the rough schedule going forward:

  • Midwest: East North Central (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin)
  • South: West South Central (Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas)
  • South: East South Central (Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee)
  • South: South Atlantic (Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia.
  • Northeast: Mid-Atlantic (New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania)
  • Northeast: New England (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont)

For anyone interested in daily updates, finds and random thoughts, you can follow along on Twitter, https://twitter.com/grsl1763.

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06 March 2020

Germans from Russia in America Merged Sources


The results of the survey have been merged with the master list of German-Russian settlements in the U.S. compiled from older sources. There are now 3,347 places on the list. Of those, 1,371 came from the survey. That's a 41% increase. This exercise proved to be very productive. 

Above is a chart and below are the numbers in a more readable format. The top states should be of no surprise to anyone other than questioning if there are indeed 441 towns in North Dakota. I had asked myself that question many months ago when there were only 404 places for North Dakota on the list. Keep in mind that there are many ghost towns, unincorporated communities, populated places, historical townships and historical post offices from the turn of the last century which were reported and are included on the list.

The log of the daily grind is on Twitter, https://twitter.com/grsl1763 for those interested.


State# of locationsState# of locations
North Dakota441Utah21
South Dakota310New Jersey20
California241Indiana19
Kansas215North Carolina15
Washington199Tennessee15
Montana165Alabama14
Colorado158Connecticut13
Wisconsin148Kentucky11
Nebraska147Arkansas11
Texas127Maryland10
Oklahoma123Alaska9
Illinois119Nevada9
Michigan116Massachusetts9
Minnesota101Georgia8
Oregon98South Carolina8
Idaho78Hawaii7
Florida49Louisiana7
Wyoming45Maine5
Iowa44New Hampshire4
Ohio35Delaware3
Arizona31Mississippi2
Missouri31Guam1
Virginia28District of Columbia1
New Mexico26West Virginia1
New York25Rhode Island1
Pennsylvania22Vermont1



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