While working on a genealogy project this weekend, I stumbled across a place of birth named Pawlowsky or Khutor Pawlowka . The place name does not appear in gazetteers of known places where Germans lived. It sporadically appears in sources as a surname unrelated to the German population. The parish where the baptism occurred was in Bergdorf, part of the Glückstal enclave in Kherson province.
The khutor was easy enough to find. I looked through the Glückstal parish records and found when other births occurred in the location. Coupled with already knowing the location of Bergdorf (Colosova, Moldova today), it was a matter of paging through old maps looking at Bergdorf and then scanning the surrounding area. Pawlowsky appears 12 km (7.5 miles) NE of Bergdorf, right next to Martienskij-Karaban (Karabanove, Odesa Oblast, Ukraine today), another village that does not appear in GR gazetteers but was a known place where Germans lived from Bergdorf baptism records.
The earliest map on which it appears by name is the Schubert map from 1868. It disappeared from maps after WWII.
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| Schubert map showing Bergdorf (lower left) and Pawlowka/Pawlowsky (upper right) and a few of the daughter colonies served by the Bergdorf parish. Source: EtoMesto |
The surnames that appear in parish records associated with Pawlowsky are Flemmer, Göbel, Laitenberger, Lippert, Leicht, Maier, Scheuffele, Schmidt, Spitzer, and Wolff. It appears there were just a handful of families. There may have been others, but it was a small khutor and baptisms may have not noted the birth place and used just Bergdorf instead.
Translations of the Glückstal parish records, including Bergdorf, can be found at this link on Black Sea German Research. Each record links to the scan on FamilySearch so you can download a copy.
The pin for Pawlowsky will be added in the next round of map updates, but for now, this is where it was.
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Last updated 8 June 2025