All My Ancestors

Here’s this week’s genealogy blog prompt:

Week #39: Did your ancestors come by boat? Talk about the documentation that records their departure and arrival.

I have only one family line that I know of that came by boat.  They are my Mennonite Germans from Russia who came to the US late in 1874.

This is a group of folks not widely known outside of those of us who descend from them.  And, honestly, I didn’t know all that much about them growing up.  The short version is that groups of German farmers were invited into the steppes of Russia by Catherine the Great because she want to settle southern Russia and because she knew they were very good farmers.  Some of them came from Switzerland, originally, but some of them had also gone to Holland.  The went into Russia because they had a deal with Catherine that they could retain their own language, have their own schools, and, perhaps most importantly, not be subject to the draft into the Russian army.  My branch were Mennonites and, as such, did not believe in bearing arms.  There are also groups of Catholics and evangelical Lutherans in the larger group of Germans from Russia.

When the US wanted to develop what had been called “The Great American Desert” in the middle of the country, much of the land was ceded to the railroads.  The railroads began to market this land to persons from Scandinavia as well as to these Germans in Russia.  As it happened, these offers came at an opportune time.  Catherine was dead and her son Peter was re-thinking some of her policies, military service being foremost among them.  So the Germans who were still living in Russia began to leave.  They went to Canada, to Mexico, to South America, and large groups of them came to the plains in the US–the Dakotas, Nebraska, eastern Colorado, and Kansas.  They brought their ways with them and they also brought what is today known as turkey red wheat, the a strong part of the economy of this area for decades.  This was wheat that would grow over the winter with large yields the following summer.

Passenger lists indicate that my Buller and Unruh family members departed from Antwerp aboard the Vaderland.  I have gleaned this story from various sources–from family members, from a publication entitled Brothers in Deed to Brothers in Need: A Scrapbook about Mennonite Immigrants from Russia, 1870-1885, and from a family publication entitled The Genealogical Record of Henry Schmidt and his Descendants (1807-1954) by Mae Koehn Curtis I was fortunate enough to receive from one of my grandfather’s cousins.  (I have a faint memory of making a photocopy of this book on yellow paper at the church in my rural hometown–the only place in town at that time that had an accessible photocopier.)  The Brothers in Deed book was a treasure for Germans from Russia Mennonite researchers–it really was a scrapbook of newspaper clippings and passenger lists.  I had no idea at the time about the existence of passenger lists, much less how to locate one. Clarence Hiebert included them in this publication.  Later, I could confirm what he’d re-printed as well as the stories recorded by Mrs. Curtis.

All of these sources said my families came aboard the Vaderland, a ship from the Belgian Red Star line.  According to Ancestry.com‘s Passenger Ships and Images, the maiden voyage for this ship was January 1873, sailing from Antwerp to Philadelphia, a route followed by my ancestors a two years later.  The ship was built in England and its sister ships were Nederland and Switzerland, ship names that occur frequently in the Germans from Russia passenger lists from this time period.

Toward the bottom of this passenger list, accessed at Ancestry.com, my 3rd great-grandparents, Peter David and Eva Schmidt Buller and their family are listed–

The family listing continues onto the next page of the passenger list, which confirms that one of the little Buller girls, Anna,  died 12 December 1874, enroute.

The story of this group of Mennonite’s arrival in Kansas is recorded in Abe Unruh’s The Helpless Poles. Due to the various boundary changes, these people from Volhynia, the area my family lived, were often referred to as Poles, or from Russia-Poland.  This created a great deal of confusion for me as I was starting looking for these folks.  (To add the mix, my granddad’s nickname was “Dutch.”)  The ship had severe problems due to rough seas–propellors broke.  Some accounts indicate they had to return to England for repairs.  It delayed the trip and they finally arrived Christmas eve or day (accounts vary) in Philadelphia.  They almost immediately boarded a train for Hutchinson, Kansas, (recorded as Atchison on the passenger list) but no one was there to meet them in the below freezing temperature.  This was partially due to all the delays that had happened on the journey.  They were finally able to move into a store a merchant opened for them, but my understanding is that they spent the rest of the winter in unheated box cars.

They were, however, industrious and hardy.  My family homesteaded in Lone Tree Township in McPherson County.  They soon grew fairly prosperous and within a few years, had enough land and money to move further south into Oklahoma Territory to homestead in what is now Alfalfa County.  I can remember visiting some of these farms as a young child and again, as an adult, a few years ago when I was invited to one of the collateral family’s reunion.

This is a photo of my Buller family a generation or so after immigration:

The father in this family, seated on the front row, is Jacob Peter Buller, shown as aged 14 on the passenger list.  He married Else Jantz, and they were the parents of 11 children.  The back row of this photo is comprised of in-laws.  The second man from the right is my great-grandfather, John Benjamin Unruh, and directly in front of him is his wife, my great-grandmother, Amanda Matilda Buller Unruh.  Down on the other end, the second man from the left is John Benjamin’s brother Simon Benjamin Unruh and in front of him is his wife Josephine Buller Unruh.  Two more of these Buller sisters married Jantz brothers.  It was a close-knit community.

So that’s the one immigration story I know from my family.  Thanks to a combination of early published and unpublished resources, including some family stories and contacts, I was able to piece together their story.  Most of the published resources were from small publishing companies that family members told me about.  Passenger lists are now much easier to access, thanks to online databases, and it is also wonderful to be able to correspond with others from this extended family.  My other family lines were here much earlier and I have yet to find their origins and dates of arrival.  I suspect the vast majority of them came from the British Isles, including some pesky Scots-Irish, but I have not jumped the pond yet.  Studying my Germans from Russia gives me a whole other perspective on my family lines and their origins

Sources:

Ancestry.com. Philadelphia Passenger Lists, 1800-1945 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2006.  Roll M425_92; Line: 15.

Hiebert, Clarence. Brothers in Deed to Brothers in Need: A Scrapbook about Mennonite Immigrants from Russia, 1870-1885. Newton, KS: Faith and Life Press, 1974.

Curtis, May Koehn.  The Genealogical Record of Henry Schmidt and his Descendants (1807-1954).  Washington, DC: author, 1955.

Unruh, Abe J. The Helpless Poles. Montezuma, KS: author, 1973.

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