Germans in Russia Colonies
Help!! I am having people that are going into our very detailed Germans in Russia colony records and changing the names to the current Russian cities. This is I believe the destruction of a very specific group of colonists that were from Germany and went to Russia to help them with land development. Helpers from your community are correcting all our records to reflect the Russian names from the Germans in Russia colony names. Please CORRECT this. The Germans in Russia history is extremely important to us descendants and this is affecting so many of us. If we want to visit Russia we will look up the village, if nothing else put in the Russian name as a sidebar! Many of our relatives are in our histories and books as from Kassel, Glueckstal Parish, Odessa, Russia - please make a change to your programs. We want our history not erased which is what the conversion is doing! The Germans in Russia colony maps would also be beneficial to our group. Please Please Please do not cancel out our history.
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I don't have a PhD in Russian Empire either. I'm sure someone does and can go in and correct FamilySearch placenames - or submit those corrections. Once the database is correct then users will just need to be careful when selecting what Standardized placename (make sure it's for the correct timeframe). But in this case, Germans might continue referring to the German colony name even after the Russification changes ... so it is somewhat ambiguous. I think that is why there are two placename fields - the one you know (or the record shows) and the Standardized ...
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Coincidentally, about an hour after posting my last entry, I was listening to someone who is working to improve Ukrainian place names and she mentioned one of these German villages. This one: https://www.familysearch.org/research/places/?searchTypeaheadInputText=11825216&text=11825216
You can see that it has been entered with three historical time periods (I have no idea why there is a gap) and the earliest one does have the German name. So this particular village can be entered with this form and it will even have a map pin which generally will keep people from changing it.
So there is hope. The trouble is there are so many places in the world that are not in the database and so few people working to improve it. But I do know that the team that works on it does focus on adding and improving places that have been requested by users. So send in your requests.
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First - let me agree - placenames of colonies of Germans from Russia should be preserved (as you indicate that's the name German colonists/ethnic records would recognize). Second - I'm not aware of the names changing - this is the first I've heard. Third - I am aware of FamilySearch incorporating recently acquired 'Concordia collection' but am unaware if this 'project' would be affecting colony names. Fourth - perhaps a representative at the wiki could provide further insight? https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Germans_from_Russia_Societies
If the problem is a result of other placenames submissions - you can submit corrections/additions to places at:
https://www.familysearch.org/research/places/?pagenum=1&pagesize=20
Summary: As you mention the German colony names should at least be listed as alternate to successive/Russian place names (pay close attention to the date ranges -perhaps that is what is/has occurred)? Sorry - my comments are made without investigating specific placenames.
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So, this is a very confusing point to me. I am one of those types who changes USA to British Colonial America, muttering to myself as I do it, so I understand what you are saying. BUT, the list of standard place names for German colonies in the former Russian Empire is not correct, AND I don't have a PhD in Russian Empire provinces so I can't fix it. My husband's ancestors are from Selz, Kutschurgan, (or is it Odessa??) Russian Empire, what is now Lymans'ke, Ukraine. This was one of the Black Sea colonies. Because Seltz / Selz doesn't exist anymore, I have given up and I use Lymans'ke, but put a note as to the original ancestral name. I tried to add a standardized name to the list for the complete ancestral location, because people can do that as I think @genthusiast alluded to, but I got stuck with the date range for the provinces and had to give up.
So I have punted on this and it is the ONLY instance where I deliberately use an incorrect but STANDARDIZED place name because I am confused about what to do.
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@genthusiast I don’t think any modern day Germans will refer to German colonies by their ancestral names because most ethnic German colonists were massacred or sent East to Siberia in either 1941 or 1944. The villages were repopulated with locals and renamed. One of the problems with records in these locations is that they are for a ghost population that no longer exists.
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I differ but perhaps from lack of knowledge. They did exist and they have descendants (whom are not ghosts). Unfortunately I cannot comment on any genocide - I don't know that part. I do know they were mistreated.
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Can you post a couple of examples where these place names have been changed?
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There is quite a good resource for mapping/location of these colonies:
https://www.germansfromrussiasettlementlocations.org/
Perhaps there could be some collaboration with FamilySearch.
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Hello, thanks for your responses. The Germans in Russia descendants have not all been sent to Siberia or persecuted. There were many though but we are proud of our Germans in Russia heritage. These people were not considered Russians but Germans whom Catherine the Great got to come to Russia to help them learn to be better farmers, etc. The Germans in Russia groups across the Country would support use of the old names I believe. We have copies of the colony maps but that doesn't help us when they are changed to the Russian names. I find it offensive when the colonie names are changed to the Russian names. Someone came in and changed most of my entries to the Russian names as a correction. GRRRRR.
The Census records by Karl Stumpff for 1816 and 1856 gives detailed Germans in Russia colony breakdown
Examples:
Kassel, Odessa, Russia, Kostitz, Bessarabia, Hoffnungstahl, Odessa, Gluckstal, Odessa. These are just a few. There were many, many colonies.
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@familyinfogatherer Yes, but not all Germans responded to Catherine the Great. Her grandson also issued an invitation, and my husband's ancestors responded to that. The group of colonies they formed in the early 1800s were in the Black Sea group. Yes, we would all support the use of the old names (we being GFR Americans), and to be sure, in genealogy, the rule is to do exactly that. This is one of the most complex place issues on my (greater) family tree, and I have posted quite a bit about how the Standardized place names in FamilySearch don't play nice in history. In other threads I have questioned if FamilySearch is going to support historic place names going back 1000 years around the globe. Certainly there are plenty of sources to support some trees going back that far.
@Gordon Collett Here is a very comprehensive list of old and new colony names as well as their placement in a functional google map.
There is quite a bit of information on this site as you will see immediately upon looked at the url which is a working google map that can be zoomed in or out. Each pin is a former colony with an ancestral name and a current name. Each pin defaults to the current name of a former colony, but when zooming in you see ancestral name, current name Latin letters and current name Cyrillic. My husband's people were in what is called South Russia, Kherson province (which is yet a third name I've seen for that province.) Zooming in on Selz, I took a screen shot and attached it.
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Sorry, I wasn't clear. Can you please post the ID numbers of a couple of people in Family Tree who had the place name changed from the original German to the modern Russian name?
The first step in fixing a problem is figuring out why it is occurring in the first place. Not that I can fix anything, but if enough information is provided here, maybe someone who can fix things will take note. I suspicious that the problem you are seeing is due to the very common problem of people not understanding what it means to "standardize" names in Family Tree or due to inadequacies in the Places database. The first is fixed by trying to teach people how to use Family Tree correctly. The second is fixed by requesting improvements in the database.
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I made a post that somehow didn't get succeed in getting posted.
Here is a massive list of colonies, on a map, with ancestral names, current names in Latin letters and current names in Cyrillic.
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Thank you. But could someone please list a person in Family Tree, with ID number, who had place names edited inappropriately?
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@familyinfogatherer That is terrible! I do see people changing place names to standardized ones, but not in my husband's GFR line. Exception is a person is changing some place names, but she is also working on the ancestor in other ways, so that is not really what you are talking about.
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Gordon - Try my grandfathers - Friedrich Haas 1886-1970 KZWK-GBZ, Grandmother Eva Kurle LWYN-DNP, Margaret Frank L4JL-7BH
Michael Haas G7PZ-KFX Friedrich Haas LZZ8-3G4
I think these are the right numbers
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Thank you all for checking into this. I appreciate your time.
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So here is the story, taking as an example Friedrich Haas, in the Change Log:
In Feb 2012, this profile was imported into Family Tree from a previous database. Interesting to see that a user actually got credit for the entry. Most of the time a 2012 import for the original creation of the Family Tree database would just say FamilySearch.
In May of last year FamilySearch did some type of background administrative process that did not change any data. That may have been when a update removed a lot of linked standardized version of place names, leaving the entered place name without a linked standard.
The July 2020 entry means that the place name at that time had a red exclamation point. That is what throws it into the Volunteer Project bucket. That project attaches standards to place names that do not have one in Family Tree. It never changes the displayed place name.
I'm assuming here that Kassel, etc., is the correct German colony place name and is how you want it displayed in Family Tree. Since that place name does not currently exist in the FamilySearch Places database, it would have to be standardized one or two geographical levels up or even like this:
This is correct data entry in Family Tree. Places entered with the correct name linked to an incomplete standardized version will not have a map pin on the detail page. But that is perfectly fine and perfectly correct. The program functions completely normally as it is designed for this type of place name entry.
Now comes the problem. "Profile updater" who has chosen a user name that makes him look like an automated, official routine uses the also very official sounding reason of "Resolving place name in FamilySearch" to wreck your place name. Clicking on his name, you can see his photo and he does have relationship viewing enabled so you can click on that and see how he is related to you. Turns out he is my 8th cousin twice removed so I will apologize on his behalf even though I have no idea who he is and I probably have thousands of 8th cousins twice removed. Our lines cross in the mid-1600s.
If you are lucky, he will turn out to be a very close relative to you and you can sit down with him and have a talk.
Clearly he is one of the very many users of Family Tree who have no idea how standardization works here and is working under the totally wrong misunderstanding that all place names have to have a map pin next to them.
You need to do three things.
1) Correct all your place names and put them back to how they should be, linked to the best available standard even it that is just "Russia."
2) Message Profile updater and explain to him why the place names should have their German form, teach him how to correctly standardize places, and request that he not degrade the quality of the database in a quest for map pins.
3) Put in a request to the FamilySearch Places Authority team to add these German versions in the proper time periods to the Places database. You can do this through the Places database itself through the Suggest A New Place link: https://www.familysearch.org/research/places/?pagenum=1&pagesize=20 one at a time or by posting the problem you are having in the Communities group https://community.familysearch.org/en/group/68-familysearch-places . You do need to join the group to post to it. Looking at the map posted above, getting in all the places correctly in the database will be a huge task but you should at least be able to get the place names for your family in fairly easily.
Good luck on this project!
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Thank you all for your help. I have added this to one of the categories you suggested. I am hopeful that they will help with this problem. I don't know if there is a way for me to help with this but I could certainly create a group of the colonies for programmers or something.
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Hello fellow descendant of Germans from Russia! I was actually just updating place names on my relevant people in order to remove a lot of incorrect references to the USSR and Moldova when I really needed "Glückstal, Kherson, Russian Empire" the current standardized form. In this case it took extra research to find the right spelling so I was especially grateful for all of the resources gathered and made available by others researching these communities. I'm sorry that someone appears to be more destructive than the usual new or inexperienced user, but it's an anxiety-inducing risk of this kind of collaboration.
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Gina: We knew of the colony names by the great census book of Karl Stumpp [Karl Stumpp - The Emigration from Germany to Russia in the Years 1763-1862 and many of the early Germans in Russia literature.
For example Kassel
Kassel, Glueckstal, Odessa, Russia.
We had records in quite a few Parishes and it is so helpful to go back to the records if the Parishes are recognized also. I have most of the births, deaths and marriage records consolidated from the Parish record
Colonies = Odessa, Taurien, Bessarabia, Dnjepropetrowsk, Belowesh, Krim, Bei Berdjansk, Sudkaukasus, Graunau
Church Parishes were Glueckstal Parish, Gueldendorf Parish, Bessarabia, Rohrbach
Villages were listed first, then parish, then region, then country. This is beneficial when pulling the old parish records.
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Can someone tell me how I can get a printout of my family lifestory/memories. I didn't see that option and I would like to make up a little book for my grandchildren.
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familyinfogatherer You are in a special position with access to parish records. You have your records because the Bessarabians were the ONLY group to be able to take their records with them when they left their colonies. No other area has such records, and we all depend on the ability of dedicated researchers such as Mervin Weiss who took a team and tried to access the wealth of records for the Black Sea area. This collection was not handed over to the Ukraine when the Soviet Union split up, they are in the Russian State Archives in Saratov, even though the records are for locations now in the Ukraine. When Merin and his international team accessed the collection (having coordinated this visit well in advance), they were allowed to make phone images of the records for 1 day only, and then were shut down the next day. They managed to capture only the death records for the colony of Strassburg from 1865-1880. This is the state of records access for most former German colonies that were in the Russian Empire. I attended several GFR conferences, and a woman who specializes in researching the current Ukraine record collections asked local officials if they would ever be digitized. The answer she was given at that time was no they will not be digitized, these people don't live here any more and these records are not of our ancestors. Embrace your Bessarabian records. You have special access.
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I am blessed.
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Places everywhere change their names, and are moved from one jurisdiction to another. Some places find themselves in different countries, at different times.
For my own records, I try to record the place name / jurisdiction as it was at the time of the event, and also as it currently named. Although current name is a moving target; place names are still changing.
The Gramps genealogy program allows for this. You can assign a range of dates for a place's name and jurisdiction. Perhaps Family Search will do something similar. Of course, that would be a major and complicated update, so it may not be a top priority.
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Familysearch placenames does this currently. If people have corrections they can be submitted at:
it is a constant work-in-progress ...
For example, view Gordon's answer at:
https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/comment/425457#Comment_425457
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Having appropriate historical place names with set range of dates for name and jurisdiction has been a part of Family Tree ever since it opened. No update is needed because it is already here.
You may not have noticed or been working in a place where this can be seen, but when entering place names we are often given a choice of name and jurisdiction based on years as you can see for this farm in Norway where I have four different choices based on time span:
In addition to this, we can use whichever historical spelling is most most correct and link our entry to the correct place name from this list:
However, the world is a big place. The Places database where all this information is stored is far from complete. You can explore it here: https://www.familysearch.org/research/places/
Regarding priorities, there is a division of FamilySearch, the Places Authority Team whose entire job is to expand and correct that database. It is their top, and pretty much only, priority. Which areas of the world are being worked on are set by two things: projects they have decided will have the greatest value for FamilySearch users in general and patron submitted requests.
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On the FamilySearch Research Wiki (https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Black_Sea_Germans) Kassel is under Cherson Gubernia, Tiraspol Uyezd. On the English Wikipedia it is under Glückstal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_Germans#Glückstal) as Neu Kassel. In FamilySearch Places (aka our gazetteer) at this time there is no entry anywhere near close to any of these names.
Simple solution: request this Kassel be added to Places. In the request provide the wiki links to help the gazetteer curators work up enough details, especially the timeframe.
One side effect of building the gazetteer after sources have been indexed and attached to profiles on Family Tree, is that revisions will be needed to get the desired name to display.
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Aside to @Gail Swihart Watson:
Next time don't quit too soon. You don't need to provide complete information; FS staff are able to work from incomplete information.
What I usually do when the correct standard is missing, is enter what the standard should be, and manually select the non-standard "none of the above". Yes, that puts up a red flag. That's okay. If other contributors try to fix the flag by using an incorrect standard, I add an explanation that the appropriate standard has been requested.
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On March 14, 2022, @Cheryl Viering wrote "Regarding priorities, there is a division of FamilySearch, the Places Authority Team whose entire job is to expand and correct that database. It is their top, and pretty much only, priority. Which areas of the world are being worked on are set by two things: projects they have decided will have the greatest value for FamilySearch users in general and patron submitted requests."
Does anyone know if any work is currently in progress for Russia? I have submitted several requests for name standards to be created. The policy posted by FamilySearch is not to respond to requests and in my case they have not responded. It would be really nice to know if they have received the request; if it will be considered for a database update; or when it might be reviewed.
I agree with others who have noted that standards generally do not exist in Russia. I for one would be really excited if it were possible to help update Russian standards.
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@Brent W Hale, just this week I got a response to Places feedback that I submitted sometime last year. It was Hungary/Slovakia, not Russia, so not directly relevant to your question, but yes, the team is still plugging along, responding to feedback eventually.
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