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| The City Bridge in Libau “The main train station is located in Neu-Libau, that is, in the part of the city that has only been settled in recent decades, since the opening of the railroad in 1871. The outlet of Lake Libau, which has been developed into a commercial port, separates Neu-Libau from Alt-Libau. A wooden bridge was built across this body of water in 1830; it was replaced in 1885 by an iron bridge, which has long since ceased to meet traffic demands. The view of the city from this bridge as one enters Alt-Libau gives no indication of the importance this location holds for trade and shipping.” From the 1912 Adolf Richters Baltische Verkehrs- und Adressbücher 02 Kurlyandiya |
Many of our German ancestors emigrated from Russia out of the port of Libau (a.k.a. Libava, Lebava, Либава and today Liepāja) in the far western province of Courland in Latvia today. The image above from 1912 looking back on the old part of the city with the iron bridge and Trinity Lutheran Church rising in the background on Grosse Strasse was likely one of their last views of Russia before departing.
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A Brief History
Before the Livonian Crusades (1198-1290), there was a small fishing village named Līva on the outlet of Līva River to the Baltic Sea roughly where Libau is today. It was inhabited by Curonians, an ancient medieval tribe of people that lived along the shores of the Baltic Sea as far back as the 5th century. The village was first documented on 4 April 1253 in a land-partition treaty between the Bishop of Courland and the Livonian Order (an autonomous branch of the Teutonic Knights) as they divided the newly conquered region of Courland. By 1263, the Order had established a fortified settlement at the site giving it the German name Libau.
Libau remained under the control of the Livonian Order until the order dissolved in 1561. It was then integrated into the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia, a vassal state of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Regional autonomy ended in 1795 during the Third Partition of Poland when the Russian Empire officially annexed the region and absorbed Libau into its territory.
As Russia’s westernmost city, Libau was at the time only about 45 miles (about 70 kilometers) from the Prussian border. At the time, it was a small town that was mostly ethnically German with merchants, craftsmen, and nobles. The German language was spoken by both Germans and Jews. The percentage of Germans decreased as Libau grew and more non-German populations moved into the city for work, particularly with the arrival and expansion of the railroad and the building and operation of the naval port. World War I and the Russian Revolutions decreased the population further as the Germans were impacted by Russia’s “Liquidation Law” aimed at expropriation of Germans in Russia. Some were deported to Siberia while others fled. Others left after the fall of the Russian Empire when Latvia gained its first independence. In 1939 after German-Soviet agreements, Hitler ordered the resettlement of Baltic Germans to Nazi-occupied territory. The Black Sea German Research database has some EWZ (Einwandererzentralstelle) immigration records for those resettlers.
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| Postcard with a city view of Grosse Strasse in Alt-Libau circa 1910. |
Religion and Churches
The Crusades in Estonia and Latvia were led by German and Danish knights to forcibly Christianize the pagan Baltic and Finnic tribes. The churches and monasteries established were Roman Catholic, and Catholicism would rule the land until shortly after Martin Luther nailed his “Ninety-Five Theses” to the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517, sparking the Protestant Reformation. The Baltic Germans soon brought Lutheranism to the region between 1520 and 1530, and between 1545 and 1620, Catholic churches were reconsecrated to Protestant churches. When the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia of which Libau was a part was established in 1561, Lutheranism became the official state religion, although the state itself was under secular rule.
There are two Lutheran churches in Libau. St. Anne’s Church was built in 1508 and is the oldest church in the city. It was originally a Roman Catholic church and was reconsecrated around 1560 as a Lutheran church. It was primarily for the Latvian community in Libau. The Holy Trinity Cathedral was the Lutheran church built specifically for the German community and was consecrated 5 December 1758. It has one of the largest mechanical pipe organs in the world.
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| Postcard showing the German Trinity Lutheran Church circa 1906. |
Early on, Jews were legally barred from permanently settling in Libau. According to a 1625 charter, "Jews and anti-Christs will not be tolerated here,” in order to supposedly protect German merchants from competition from Jewish merchants. In 1799, a few years after the Duchy of Courland became a part of the Russian Empire, Russia granted Jews the right to settle in Libau. Emperor Paul I ratified a law that granted Courland’s Jews permanent residency rights, legal status, the ability to participate in local elections, to own land, and build synagogues and cemeteries. The First Synagogue was built immediately in 1799 on Joachim Strasse. Second Synagogue was built in 1828, and Great Choral Synagogue between 1870–1873.
In addition, there were German and Latvian Baptist prayer houses; an Old Believers’ Church; and Russian Orthodox churches including All Saints Church, Alexander Nevsky Church, and Marine Nikolai Cathedral in the Naval Port.
Some church and civil records for Libau are available from FamilySearch here. Most are in Latvian, German, Russian, and a few in Latin (the Catholic records).
The Port and Railway
Although Libau was a warm-water port that was open year round, was not developed until the 1800s. Between 1739-1780, the number of ships entering Libau’s harbor were from between 146 to 304. Work to deepen the harbor to accommodate larger ships, including ocean steamers, was carried out several times. By 1868, Libau had what was considered a modern harbor.
In the 1919 book Commercial Russia, author William Henry Beable wrote that Libau’s chief imports were coal and herring, and its exports were timber, grain and eggs. Horses were also an export from the port, per the article “The Port Jews of Libau, 1880-1914.” Libau’s import/export of goods was smaller than other Baltic ports: Riga with imports of salt fish, raw cotton, machinery, oil, coal, wine and fruits, and exports of timber, eggs, butter, flax, hemp, linseed, hides, skins, cereals, and other agricultural produce; and Revel (Tallinn, Estonia today) with imports of raw materials such as hides and also reportedly (by Beable) an annual importation of cotton that exceeded 100 million pounds.
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| Postcard of the harbor in Libau circa 1906. Another vantage point of the footbridge connecting Alt-Libau to Neu-Libau. |
Approval of the construction of the first railroad in Russia was in 1835. The segment, Tsarskoye Selo Railway, was very short. In 1842, the massive St. Petersburg-Moscow line was approved and opened by 1851 with Moscow as the central hub of the railroad network. The Libau-Romny railway line was built to connect Libau on the Baltic Sea to the fertile grain-growing region of provinces in southern Russia. The first section opened in 1871, the Libau–Koshedary line connecting to the Northwest Railway in the province of Wilna between Kowno and the city of Wilna. This made Libau a viable choice for emigration, although it wouldn’t be until the 1890s that it became a major emigration port. Meanwhile, railway lines serving Ekaterinoslav, Kherson, Taurida, and Bessarabia all tied into other lines leading to Libau. Importantly to note was that the Libau-Romny railway line ran through the Pale of Settlement, which made emigration of Jews to North America possible.
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| Section of “Die russischen Eisenbahnen” (The Russian Railways) map from 1912. The highlighting in blue follows the Libau-Romny railway line. |
By 1880, the transportation infrastructure was in place for large scale emigration out of the port of Libau. Just in time for mass German emigration from Russia.
The Business of Emigration
Between 4.5 to 5 million people of all backgrounds left the Russian empire between 1881 and 1914. About 3 million arrived in the U.S. as from “Russia.” It is estimated that just under a half million emigrants left through Libau. Although this number is significantly lower than what other ports for example in Germany or the Netherlands handled, it was the single most important emigration port in the Russian Empire.
Emigration was big business. It was also technically illegal.
The Bureaucracy
Imperial Russia was an empire, and it viewed its population not as autonomous citizens but as permanent property of the Crown who owed taxes, military service, and allegiance to the Crown. Allowing people to leave meant losing manpower and taxpayers.
Under Emperor Nicholas I, the 1845 Penal Code (Уложение о наказаниях уголовных и исправитель’них or The Code of Criminal and Correctional Punishments) codified into absolute law the edicts of restricted travel made by Catherine the Great and others before her. According to this code:
- Anyone who left the country and entered the service of a foreign power without the explicit permission of the government, or became a citizen/subject of a foreign power, was guilty of breaching their oath of allegiance to the empire.
- The penalty was the loss of all civil rights and privileges (including class distinctions and nobility), the forfeiture of all property, and eternal exile from the empire.
- If they returned voluntarily, they were immediately arrested and sentenced to hard labor or permanent exile to Siberia.
Anyone who left knew they were burning their bridges and that their journey was one-way, although some did return as citizens of their new countries to visit relatives in their old country.
In 1871, the Germans in Russia were stripped of their status of “colonist.” This prompted the German and Mennonite emigration from Russia. Some sources cite a special exception made for Volga Germans, granting them a 10-year grace period to legally emigrate from Russia if they wanted to, but there was no mention of emigration from the Russian Empire in the 1871 decree. In reading the original text of decree 49705 here, the 10-year period is now well-known empty promise of exemption from military service for 10 years, which the Russian government reneged on a few years later in 1874.
How do you emigrate when emigration was illegal? Well, you simply “temporarily traveled” abroad on a short-term visa to visit relatives or friends and didn’t go back.
In George Rath’s The Black Sea Germans in the Dakotas (1977), Heinrich Stoller recounts what it took for his family to obtain a passport for their emigration from Russia in November 1872:
“To go abroad one had to get a passport but since one could not get an emigration passport, we had to get a traveling passport, which was also connected with great difficulties as well as time-consuming for already in our own village [Rohrbach, Beresan] difficulties began. From there one had to go to the district office and from there to the county. And since Odessa was the county seat and the way there quite far at that time, since most of it had to be made by wagon, it cost much time and money. But when you came to the provincial office the road at our time for the most part was prepared by bribing the lower officials. Once you had a passport, there were no further difficulties to be expected at the state line and even the higher government officials let it pass at that.”
After conscription began, one of the requirements of obtaining a passport was proof of, or exemption from, Russian military service. Many young German men getting close to conscription age “traveled” abroad before their 21st birthdays, often alone. Those who were too late, another option became available: a labor passport and assistance from what one person called the “underground agency.” In other words, they were smuggled out. Paul Straub of Neu-Lustdorf (Liebental enclave) explained in his first-hand account in the article “Details of the Flight of Paul Straub from Russia to America,” Heritage Review, Vol. 12, No. 4, December 1982:
“After a year on this land, with the situation becoming worse, my brother Fred, through correspondence with our Uncle Henry Straub who had immigrated to America in 1893, decided to go to America too where there was freedom and prosperity...so I also went to get a passport. However, I was unable to get one because I had been of military draft age for about four months. Since I couldn’t get a passport to America I was informed by the ‘Underground Agency’ that I could get a Labor Passport, which would enable me to travel anywhere within the Russian border without fear of being questioned. They also informed me that for 145 rubles [in 1913 was about $74.60 USD; modern purchasing power about $2,528.28 USD] they would assist in getting me across the Russian border from Odessa, Russia, to Bremen, Germany. So what was I to do besides either face the consequences or else get across the border.”
Straub went on to describe his numerous handoffs to other “underground agents” along the way, and at one point noted, “To my surprise there were 13 of us underground immigrants who were going the same direction.” Straub arrived Baltimore weeks before Germany declared war on Russia and ports in both countries closed.
Neither Stoller nor Straub left through Libau, but their accounts show what every emigrant faced. All required proper paperwork (all requiring time and fees) before leaving: a Russian passport; an exit passport or foreign visa; certificate of probity stating the traveler had no criminal or legal charges pending; proof of either military service or exemption from military conscription; and transit documents to their final destination (i.e. railway tickets to the port, steamship tickets, railway tickets or other transport tickets to the friend or relative they were going to “visit”). Not only illegal, emigration from Russia was difficult, expensive, and time consuming.
Travel Arrangements
So, why go through Libau rather than ports in Germany or Amsterdam?
Most of the German settlers were not near a port city that carried passengers. Even St. Petersburg was historically ice-bound almost half of the year. Germans in European Russia who wanted to emigrate went west to ports in Germany, the Netherlands, or Russia’s own port on the Baltic Sea, Libau.
While the port of Odessa is a warm-water port and certainly was closer for Germans in the southern provinces of Russia, there were not many passenger ships leaving out of Odessa. It was built as a grain port. The few passenger ships were smaller feeder lines to other ports in the Ottoman Empire. There was a short-lived route in 1906–1907 that went from Odessa through Piraeus, Greece to New York via the Northern Steamship Company. Passenger manifests show roughly 68 German passengers on two voyages. The Russian Volunteer Fleet (Dobroflot) had an Odessa–Nagasaki–Shanghai–Vladivostok route that ran from 1878 to possibly 1920. Unable to find any manifests, I wondered how many (if any) Germans from Russia took that very long route, or emigrated anywhere from the Far East to the Americas.
Libau may have been easier to arrange with no foreign border crossings to worry about with travel by Russian railway all the way to the port. Passenger manifests indicate that many traveled a very long way to Libau—not only from the Volga region but also some from the province of Erivan, the Russian part of Armenia. Others may have wanted to leave Russia as quickly as possible and may have been willing to endure the additional border checks in the Austro-Hungarian and/or German empires, health checks, and train changes, as well as likely an additional charge. Maybe it felt closer to cutting through these other German-speaking places.
It is most likely our ancestors had taken travel advice from those who left before them. The first to advise Germans about how to get to America was Ludwig Bette from the group that left the Beresan enclave for Sandusky, Ohio in 1849. Scouts from Volga, Black Sea, and Mennonite settlements were sent to America looking for land, and no doubt they came back with advice on how to travel as well as where to go when you arrived.
Travel arrangements could be made on either side of the Atlantic, and it was not uncommon for relatives in the Americas to arrange and pay for tickets and have them sent with instructions to family members in Russia. That action probably made it look more like “travel” to visit relatives and less like “emigration,” for whatever that was worth. This was how my grandmother and her siblings came to the United States.
Initially, travel out of Libau was on smaller “feeder ships” to other ports in Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, France, and England. But in 1906, direct passage from Libau to New York was established, which could have been a draw. The feeder ships also continued taking passengers to other ports with direct routes to the Americas.
Ticket agents and shipping companies advertised travel out of Libau in German publications in Russia such as the Friedensbote: Monatsblatt für das Christliche Haus, Deutscher Volkskalender für Stadt und Land, Illustrierter Molotschnaer Volks-Kalender für die deutschen Ansiedler in Süd-Russland, Neuer Haus- und Landwirtschaftskalender für deutsche Ansiedler im südlichen Russland and others. There were also advertisements in German-language American newspapers like Die Eureka Post (Eureka, McPherson County, South Dakota). They touted attractive things like cheap fares, direct routes, good food, weekly travel opportunities, and ticket agents with local offices in places like Saratov and Odessa.
Agents booked train travel from the nearest rail hub all the way to the port of departure, and on arrival abroad, also booked transit tickets to the traveler’s final destination, or wherever the railway ended.
It was illegal to advertise emigration from Russia, but advertising travel to North America, Canada, South America, Africa, Australia, England and elsewhere was perfectly legal. The language used in the ads was careful and deliberate: “Anyone intending to travel to America or Africa or to any other place in the world would do well to inquire with us first, since we are glad to assist travelers with advice and help at any time...”
Overall, the cost (passport plus travel tickets plus local bribes) was not that much different for an otherwise standard journey (minus any extra for smuggling). Some Germans may have shopped around with other ticket agencies once those agencies started advertising to Germans. Maybe some of them had better connections depending on whether anyone needed to be smuggled out. Bottom line: ticket agents made money off of the German emigrants, and no doubt steered them toward ports and shipping companies that they had made deals with and got commissions from using.
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| Ticket agent advertisement examples. Left advertisement: from Deutscher Volkskalender für Stadt und Land (1909) Right advertisement: from Illustrierter Molotschnaer Volks-Kalender für die deutschen Ansiedler in Süd-Russland (1913) |
Branch in Saratov: German Street, below the "Rossiya."
Passengers find weekly travel opportunities in Libau to North America, Canada, South America, Africa, Australia, and all points in England.
Cheap fares! Good food!
Direct tickets from Libau to all railway stations of the United States of North America, and also of Canada.
Anyone intending to travel to America or Africa or to any other place in the world would do well to inquire with us first, since we are glad to assist travelers with advice and help at any time, and we answer their inquiries at once and give the information desired.
For all further information, apply to:
Knie, Falk & Co., Libau,
Alexanderstraße No. 4,
or our branch in Saratov,
German Street, below the "Rossiya."
Telegram address: Knie — Libau. Knie — Saratow.
Government-licensed office.
Guaranteed by a security deposit of 15,000 rubles lodged with the Imperial Treasury.
Passenger Transport by mail and express steamers to all parts of the world.
Direct tickets to Libau (Либава) are issued from all railway stations. From Libau every traveler can obtain a direct ticket to his final destination, since direct tickets are issued to all railway stations of the United States and Canada. On the whole journey from Libau to America travelers have to change only once. Anyone intending to travel would do well to inquire with us beforehand. Every inquiry is answered promptly.
Address: Karlsberg, Spiro & Co.
LIBAVA, Courland Governorate (German: Kurland), Vokzalnaya (Station) St.
Telegram address: Karlsberg — Libava.
Travelers from South Russia may apply to our branch in Odessa. The address of this branch is:
Karlsberg, Spiro & Co., Odessa
Yekaterininskaya 85, corner of Malo-Arnautskaya, house of the Kotlyarevsky brothers.
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| Advertisement for the Russian East Asiatic Steamship Company (also known as the Russian American Line, and after 1917, the Baltic American Line). Source: “Deutscher Volkskalender für Stadt und Land” (1909) |
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Railway Routes
As mentioned previously, direct rail connectivity via Libau-Romny railway line made it easier to get to Libau. The train station was in Neu-Libau. The harbor was only six blocks down Bahnhof Strasse.
- Saratov — via Tambov, Kozlov, Ryazan, Moscow, then west to Minsk; or, from 1874, bypassing Moscow via Ryazhsk, Skopin, and Pavelets to Vyazma.
- Samara — east of the Volga River colonies via the narrow-gauge Pokrovskaya Sloboda–Uralsk line and a Volga rail ferry (from 1896); Samara city via the Syzran–Vyazma line (which integrated the Ryazhsk–Vyazma and Ryazhsk–Morshansk lines, completed in stages between 1874 and 1892).
- Taurida and Ekaterinoslav — via the Lozovaya–Sevastopol line (completed 1875), then Kharkov, the Sumy line, and Bakhmach.
- Kherson — Odessa district via Razdelnaya, Birzula, and Kiev; Nikolaev/Yelisavetgrad via Znamenka and Kremenchug (direct beginning in 1888).
- Bessarabia — via Kishinev, Bender, Tiraspol, and the Odessa line.
For more information about the Russian railway at various times in history along with many maps, check out this past post and collection of maps. Find a map closest to your ancestor’s departure to map the most accurate possible path.
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Waiting in Libau
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| Picture postcard of the Emigrant Station in Libau circa 1910. |
When our ancestors arrived in Libau, they had to stay somewhere before their ship departed. The Emigrant Station in Libau was not opened until 1910. It was built in response to high volumes of emigrants and unsanitary conditions in private boarding houses. Before then, travelers had to find their own lodging while waiting to board their ship.
Hotels, city-operated hostels, and boarding houses were available for tired emigrants who had arrived early. Below is a list of places where some emigrants may have stayed the night (or several) before beginning their journey to the Americas. The list is from 1912, so there may have been more or less lodging options if emigrants arrived before or after 1912. There were also inns that people arriving in horse and carriage could stay at, but I did not include them since that was a less likely mode of transportation.
All of the hotels below had full dining service available. I don’t know how realistic it was that large German families emigrating from Russia would stay in places like this, but I thought they were worth including for contemplation. This part of the story is not often documented in histories of our ancestors’ journeys.
- Hotel de Rome, Herm. Drath, proprietor. Address Neumarkt/Fischstraße 1.
- Hotel St. Petersburg, H. Kirchhof, proprietor. Address Grosse Straße 15.
- Hotel Lübeck, Andr. Dollinger, proprietor. Address Seestraße 14.
- Hotel Imperial, J. Tresp, proprietor. Address Neumarkt 11.
- Hotel Europa, A. Antonaitis, proprietor. Address Jakobstraße 14.
- Hotel Kronstadt, J. Schakewitz, proprietor. Address Grosse Straße 1.
- Hotel Monopol, P. Mamonow, proprietor. Address Nordostquai 4.
- Hotel Nord, C. Lambert, proprietor. Address Nordostquai 6.
- Hotel Moskau, M. Kaß, proprietor. Address Seestraße 8.
- [City maintained Hostel] L. Aronstamm, proprietor. Address Neustraße 4.
- [City maintained Hostel] J. Neuburger, proprietor. Address Walujewstraße 47.
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The Voyage
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| “The new twin-screw steamship ‘Kursk’ of the Russian American Line in Libau.” Source: Scottish Built Ships |
To illustrate a snapshot in time, below is a list of cargo/passenger steamships departing from Libau in 1912 (destination, shipping line, ship names, schedule) from the Baltische Verkehrs- und Adressbücher. P. Bornholdt & Co. was a Danish shipping company running what looks like feeder ships.
- New York (via Rotterdam): Russian East Asiatic Steamship Co. (Kursk, Birma, Lituania, Estonia; twice monthly on Tuesdays).
- London: P. Bornholdt & Co., Grosse Str. 9 (Perm, Kasan; twice monthly).
- Hull: P. Bornholdt & Co. (Georgios I.; twice monthly).
- Copenhagen: P. Bornholdt & Co. (Esbjerg; twice monthly).
- Stettin: P. Bornholdt & Co. (Euronia; twice monthly).
- Riga (via Windau): P. Bornholdt & Co. (departures on the 5th, 10th, 15th, 20th, 25th, and 30th).
- St. Petersburg: P. Bornholdt & Co. (Saturdays; 1st class 8 Rubles, 2nd class 4 Rubles)
Earlier passenger lists and naturalization papers (Declarations of Intent) indicate other ships not listed above that sailed from Libau. Odessa Digital Library (Odessa3.org) has extractions of naturalization papers that list Libau arrivals in Baltimore, Boston, Halifax, and Philadelphia.
Both the Russian American Line and Russian Volunteer Fleet (Dobroflot) had passenger routes from Libau to New York between 1906 and 1914. The Hamburg America Line (Hamburg-Amerikanische Packetfahrt-Actien-Gesellschaft, or HAPAG) purchased controlling interest in the Russian American Line around this time.
1906-1915 — Libau - Rotterdam - New York (occasional calls at Copenhagen and Halifax)1912-1914 — Libau - Rotterdam - Halifax - New York (occasional calls at Copenhagen)1906-1908 — Libau - Rotterdam - New York
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| Part of a passenger manifest from Liverpool to New York December 1900 showing Libau noted in the corner. |
With Russia entering World War I with Germany, emigrant travel ceased in August 1914. Germans again appeared on passenger lists (the subset that Ancestry.com has at least) going through Libau between 1921-1924.
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Georg’s Story
Of the children of Glückstal colonist Wilhelm Schilling (my great-great-grandfather), there were eight who survived to adulthood. All eight emigrated to the United States between 1889 and 1901. The four who arrived in 1901 traveled through Libau. They no doubt took a feeder ship to Hull, England and found their way across the country to Liverpool and were to connect to a trans-Atlantic ship there. Their names appear with “Libau” next to them on a passenger list for a ship departing Liverpool bound for New York, but the names were also crossed out. They missed the connection and instead, they arrived on 8 January 1901. All but one: Georg, who would turn 21 years of age on January 18th and would be eligible for military service.
Georg Schilling was not on the passenger list with his siblings. Georg wasn’t on any passenger list…at least not as Georg. The story of his immigration to the U.S. is vague, even among his direct descendants. He didn’t arrive with his siblings in January 1901. There was no reason to believe that he didn’t travel with them to Libau with the intent of leaving Russia in December 1900. No reason for him to be left behind. So, did he miss the ship in Libau, or in Liverpool? Did the others miss their connecting ship in Liverpool waiting for him, or looking for him? Did he lose his ticket? Was he stuck in Libau or Liverpool? Was he too close to his 21st birthday for comfort, possessing neither proof nor exemption from military service? Was the “underground agency” that Straub wrote about something Georg used?
By Georg’s own account in the sparse paper trail of his unassuming life, his arrival year was 1899, or 1900, or 1901. He reported 1900 on his Declaration of Intent to become a U.S. citizen, which he filed in June 1902. Certificates of Arrival were not required for the immigration process until after the Naturalization Act of 1906. On censuses from 1910–1950, both 1899 and 1900 were listed, both with no proof and, frankly unlikely. But again, the information was just recorded by the census taker and not verfied. None of the years matched the arrival year of his wife, Kathrina Woehl, either. Both his obituary and the write up in the town book Spirit of Wishek: Wishek Golden Jubilee, 1898-1948 stated June 1901.
If June 1901 was in fact when he arrived, where was he and what was he doing for those five months?
No one really knows what happened to Georg, but the quiet story the family tells is that Georg was smuggled out of Russia under another name with the help of a Jewish man. No one knows the name of the man who reportedly helped him, or how it all went down. Georg took the story to his grave.
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Related Posts and Sources:
- All New York, U.S., Arriving Passenger and Crew Lists (including Castle Garden and Ellis Island), 1820-1957 [ethnicity=German + departure port=Libau], Ancestry.com.
- Baltische Verkehrs- und Adressbücher 02 Kurlyandiya [1912], Richter, Adolf. Internet Archive.
- The Black Sea Germans in the Dakotas, George Rath, 1977. WorldCat.
- Commercial Russia, William Henry Beable, 1919. Internet Archive.
- “Details of the Flight of Paul Straub from Russia to America,” Heritage Review, Vol. 12, No. 4, December 1982. Germans from Russia Heritage Society.
- “Die russischen Eisenbahnen [The Russian Railways],” 1912, American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Libraries.
- German Emigration Through Libau (Courland) (created 23 September 2026)
- Family Search, Place: Libau, Grobiņa, Courland, Russian Empire.
- “Final Point of the Russian Empire: Liepāja's Half a Million Emigrants,” Geoff Chester, 2015. Deep Baltic.
- Maps: Russian Railroads (1867-1950) (created 8 November 2019)
- Odessa Digital Archive, search for Libau in Ship and Immigration Data
- “The Port Jews of Libau, 1880–1914,” Nicholas J. Evans, 2012. Jewish Culture and History.
- Russian Railroad Maps 1877–1912, (posted 14 March 2021)
- The Ships List
- Wikipedia: Jaunliepāja, Liepāja, Russian Asiatic Steamship Company