Genealogy Bits

Pleasant Adams (1790-1846) was an early settler in Clay Co, MO and one of my key ancestors. Two of his daughters, Rebecca and Hanna Lee, were mothers to my great-grandparents, Josephine Garner and Jonathan Newby. We knew Pleasant had married Ruth Sutherland in Casey Co, KY, but researchers had never been able to identify his parents or birthplace.

A casual Google Books search one evening popped up with: Pleasant Adams of Clay Co, MO in "Appendix 8, Emigrants from Albemarle Virginia to Other States." This 1901 book, "Albemarle County in Virginia", by Edgar Woods is on the shelf at two local libraries, but how could we have known to look. THANK YOU, GOOGLE BOOKS!

Once we knew 'where to look' our research pieces started falling together. The big breaktrough came on page 232 of Carol Ruth Dawson's 1983 book "DAWSONS IN THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR (AND THEIR DESCENDANTS), Volume II":

SUSANNAH (DAWSON) ADAMS, who married RICHARD ADAMS of Albemarle Co, VA had ten issues:
5-12i James Adams
5-12j Pleasant Adams
5-12k William Adams
5-12l Benjamin Adams
5-12m Martin Adams
5-12n Sally Adams
5-12o Lynch Adams
5-12p Dawson Adams
5-12q Elizabeth Adams
5-12r Henry D. Adams

There it was, the entire family laid out in correct order! Missouri researchers had suspected relationships among some of these lines for years. A couple of months work has now sketched out most of the siblings, and identified a few of the serious researchers in those lines.

Again, Google Books searching supplied a number of useful bits to support our assumptions. We found details of the family travels from Kentucky to Missouri in the winter of 1819-20, we found Jackson Co, MO voter lists, details of a murder in Ray Co, MO, and mention of Richard Adams as Elizabeth's father when she married Isaac Odell in Independence, MO. Again, THANK YOU, GOOGLE BOOKS!

Careful study of the Casey Co, KY tax records 1807-1820 has helped to validate the family, as well as estimate some of the older sons birth dates. We found Charles Adams and Benjamin Dawson, both brothers of our couple, living nearby in Kentucky at the same time.

Details can be read in my following documents:

Richard and Susannah Adams Discovery

Overview of Adams Siblings

Richard Adams Casey Co KY Tax List

Albemarle VA Adams Family Links

None of this could have happened without context searchable old books, THANK YOU, GOOGLE BOOKS!

Among the many personal accounts we discovered while researching Germans from Russia in our recent project, one collection has stuck in our minds. We think the Colorado State University oral archive we found is worth sharing.

CSU collected sixty personal histories between 1975 and 1978 as part of a Germans from Russia in Colorado Study Project. They have posted twenty interview transcripts and audio interviews online covering a wide range of stories about life in Russia, emigration, and early days in America.

Listen to some of their stories:

Transcripts and audio stories - page one

Transcripts and audio stories - page two

Great history here, thank you CSU!

Finally located some good maps showing locations of the Volga German colony villages of Alt-Weimar and Neu-Weimar. Turns out they were at the very bottom, or southern tip, of all the German Volga settlements. Makes them easy to locate on maps, if they are actually identified.

Here are links to three maps, two showing Neu-Weimar and the last one showing the Volga German region in proximity to Moscow and the Black Sea (Schwarzes Meer).

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~jeruslannachrichten/VGColMap.htm
- Neu-Weimar at very bottom of map

http://cvgs.cu-portland.edu/images/Volga_Map_english_large.jpg
- Neu-Weimar clear at bottom of map
- note Dobrinka Village location on Volga (early Dieterle settlers there)

http://cvgs.cu-portland.edu/images/Deutsche_Auswanderung_nach_Russland.jpg
- red spots are German settlements (mother colonies)
- Dieterle family came from far right Volga Samara
large red patch (east of Moscow)

It really helps to see where the Dieterle families were living.

We just finished a delightful week of research looking for our sister-in-law's grandparents' 1913 immigration from Russian Volga Valley German settlements to Idaho. We collected a few family newspaper obituaries, did some Ancestry.com searching, and put the results together in a 10 page PDF file for Dieterle family members.

Some of the best news was that we verified they came from the small Volga Valley province of Samara and their village was Neu-Weimar. They arrived at the Port of Baltimore on 31 Jan 1913 aboard the S.S. Brandenburg and took a train to Sugar City, Idaho. It was great to learn that their Dieterle surname was not changed at immigration and that there were three small families from the same village traveling together. Each of those families named a relative back in Russia - wonderful!

We posted our finished study along with the primary George Dieterle research files on our server for anyone interested:

Georg and Maria Dieterle 1913 Immigration Doc Study - PDF

1913 George Dieterle Baltimore Imm Pass List page5A - JPG
1913 George Dieterle Baltimore Imm Pass List page5B - JPG
1918 George Dieterle WWI Draft Registration - JPG
1920 George Dieterle U.S.Census - Prowers Co, CO - JPG
1930 George Dieterle U.S.Census page1 - Prowers Co, CO - JPG
1930 George Dieterle U.S.Census page2 - Prowers Co, CO - JPG

Hope you enjoy the report. We encourage you to check out the Germans from Russia web pages we listed on page 8 of the paper. Those web sites are packed with rich Russian Volga Valley German history.

Let us know what you think...