I am supposed to be doing other things right now, but it’s hard to resist looking at a newly discovered cache of data. Maybe it’s not a new discovery, but it is new to me.
There are over 1,000 entries (a few are duplicates) for Volga Germans in the EWZ indexes in Black Sea German Research database. EWZ records were repatriation applications that ethnic Germans who resettled west back to German controlled land during WWII. Examples of what these records look like are here. Sometimes there are photos, too. BSGR has indexes for the EWZ 50 and EWZ 51 series films and a few other odd films. These are most relevant to Black Sea Germans, but I have always found records for other regions in the indexes that BSGR hosts. I had seen Volga Germans in them before, but today when I looked specifically for locations of births that contained Wolga or Volga, I was surprised at how many there were and wondered what stories lurked within them. Sometimes looking at the family members in each pedigree tells a bit of a migration story.
Yes, 1,000 is not a lot. More than 846,000 Volga Germans were deported to Soviet regions in Siberia and Central Asia in 1941. But these 1,000 were not. They resettled west.
Since a long weekend is coming up for some, and summer seems to be the season for family research, I am sharing the raw data now. I will analyze the dataset and write it up when I have a bit more time.
So much data. So little time.
Click on the image below to go to the published document. If you are a Google user, you can view/comment/download the spreadsheet here.
