[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Grandfather Schmidtke

[Jerry Frank]

At 10:55 AM 24/04/2004 -0400, David & Rose Mary Schmidtke wrote:
>I have some new information that may enable some of you to assist me.  I
>posted the following paragraph some weeks ago and got some help especially on
>locating the village.  Now some additional information.
>My grandfather Julius Schmidtke's father's name was Johann and his mother was
>Mary Burchart and both were reported to be born in Russia.  Julius' birthdate
>is Sept 15, 1865 rather than that posted in the paragrah.

Birth in Russia could still mean Russian Poland as you indicated in your 
first message.  I do not see Julius's birth record in the Volhynian 
database.  Either it is located in one of the missing sections of data or 
he was born elsewhere.


><SNIP>

>The latest information was the marriage location of the Buss' so I am
>wondering how to check on the village of Heimthal to see if it could be close
>to a "Volka" and be the place my grandmother may have been from and where she
>was married and had children before leaving for USA.  I suspect Heimthal is
>the village to which I was directed by Mr. Jerry Frank just west of Kiev.

I believe that I gave you the location of Volka (Wulka) at the same time as 
the map location for Heimtal.  It is about 20 km (12 mi) to the north of 
Heimtal.

Reference to marriage in Heimtal could mean that the families lived there 
but not necessarily.  Heimtal was the Lutheran parish centre.  People would 
travel there from the villages to be married.  Only the pastor could 
conduct marriages.  If you wanted to be married on a certain date, you 
would have to travel to where the pastor was located.  The only other 
alternative was wait for the pastor to make the rounds to your village 
Bethaus (Prayer Chapel).   Sometimes if the pastor was not available, 
people would even travel to a neighbouring parish to be married.

Having said all this, I have done some searching in the St. Pete Database 
for Schmidtke, Busse and Meister.  While some are scattered about, I find 
in common, the places of Felicianow (also known as Kruchy) and 
Johannisdorf.  These places are located about 18 km apart.  BUT, just 10 km 
northwesterly of Johannisdorf on the Slucz River is ANOTHER place called 
Wolka.  The problem with this analysis is that none of these places are 
near Heimtal nor would they have been in the Heimtal parish.  However, this 
serves to demonstrate the problem in trying to find a specific village 
which has a commonly used name.

Your only real key may be to find the names of siblings of your people in 
the hope of finding a birth record for one of them.  Once you have an 
actual record rather than just family lore, you can narrow the search.





Jerry Frank - Calgary, Alberta
FranklySpeaking at shaw.ca