Looking Two Countries Back

Dale Lee Wahl of Bremerton is involved in a wonderfully historic group with an exciting project. He is a member of the Germans from Russia Heritage Society, which is assigning individual researchers to tackle and keep track of various records from area villages.

Wahl said there are two basic organizations of German Russians in this country: the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, out of Lincoln, Neb., and the Germans from Russia Heritage Society, out of Bismarck, N.D., also known as the Black Sea or South Russia organization.

The first emigration of Germans to Russia occurred during the reign of Ivan the Terrible, 1533-1584, with German military officers, technicians, craftsman, merchants and scholars invited to help build Moscow.

The second major movement was during the reign of Peter the Great, 1672-1725, who welcomed Germans to strengthen his policy of developing a window to the West.

The third and most significant migration resulted from the manifestos of Czarina Catherine the Great, who ruled Russia from 1762-1796. Her reasons were political: to bring in Western immigrants capable of cultivating vast stretches of untilled land on the steppes, and to provide a protective wall of colonists against Asiatic tribes that posed an invasion threat from the East.

In response to her manifestos, large numbers of Germans came into the Volga and Black Sea regions. By 1867, there were nearly 2 million Germans in Russia.

Germans felt secure in their new homeland only as long as the Russian government allowed them to speak their own language, attend their own churches and maintain their own identity. This was the policy until the late 1800s when the Russian government tried to assimilate them in a transparent cover-up to take the accumulated German wealth and lands for themselves.

Jealousy was a factor. German farmers were far more successful than their Russian counterparts. Both their churches and schools operated in a unified German language, and both thrived. This in contrast to poor and fragmented Russian schools. Their language was key in keeping them together, and when the Russian tongue was mandated in 1880, the Germans grew concerned.

Fortunately for those who migrated to America, the Great Plains were being opened up to agriculture and settlement. Once here, railroads easily reached this geographic area which was very much like the steppes they left in Russia.

Some 200,000 Germans from Russia emigrated to the United States between 1870 and 1920.

Bremerton’s Wahl does not do research for those with German Russian ancestry. His focus is coordinating the GRHS Village Project in which volunteers, often descendants from a particular village in Russia, gather information to re-assemble the history of a village, its parishes and people. This information is being entered into a computer database, and will be available to all future descendants. If you want to assist in this project, contact Dale Lee Wahl at 7370 Grevena Ave., N.E., Bremerton WA, 98311-4046, or call (360) 692-8052. His Internet address is dwahl@ linknet.kitsap.lib.wa.us.

However, if you want help with German Russian ancestors, volunteers from the Eastern Washington Genealogical Society assist beginners on Thursdays in the Genealogy Section of the Spokane Public Library, downtown. EWGS has a large collection of materials on the subject.

, DataTimes MEMO: Donna Potter Phillips welcomes letters from readers. Write to her at The Spokesman-Review, Features Department, P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210. For a response, please include a selfaddressed, stamped envelope.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Donna Potter Phillips The Spokesman-Review