Volhynia
Volga German Monument in Kansas
I grew up knowing that my great grandparents were Germans who lived in Russia and emigrated to the USA, specifically Michigan, around the turn of the century.
My first forays into genealogy took me down the path of the Volga Germans – Germans who settled along the Volga River in Russia at the invitation of Catherine the Great. However, I was also told that our family lived in what is now Ukraine, not far from Lviv or Torchyn. In all of my Volga German research, I was never able to find a Volga German settlement there.
So, I turned to documents from my ancestor’s lives to train and find the actual name of their village. I looked at the ship manifest for Adoph and Lydia Flatt. Ellisisland.org has a wonderful collection of scanned and searchable manifests, which is where I found this one. In 1905 they came to the United States. The manifest lists several details about them including the place of origin: Marienkaw Crest, Russia.
So I google Marienkaw Crest, and I get nothing. So, I started checking various Volga German websites that list Russian German settlements. I found several that seemed similar – Marianowka, Marjanowka, Mariental, none of them seemed right. The location was nowhere near Torchyn or it was a Catholic settlement (Adolph and Lydia were Lutheran), or something else didn’t mesh with the rest of the knowledge I had.
Either I had the name of the town wrong, or I had some other detail about their life wrong. Well, I had a few things wrong, which made it so hard to get to the bottom of it! Next I’ll talk about what I had wrong and how I finally got it right.
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