A brief history of the John B. Goering -Jessie Schrag family through 1874, part II

by Rannie

back to Part I

BERN, SWITZERLAND – CANTON BERN AND THE BERNESE OBERLAND

The mountains around Bern, known as the Bernese Oberland were the origins of our traceable ancestors. Although Anabaptism was outlawed in Bern, the mountains seem to have been a stronghold for Anabaptist ideas. The people of this area had a rugged individualism and distrust for authority. They were more tolerant of Anabaptists and their ideas than the local authorities. The Swiss Oberland was the ancestral home of people named Stucki, Gerig (Goering), Schrack (Shrag), Kaufmann, Krehbiel, Graber, Lichti, Albrecht, Flickinger, Huwen, Lugenbill, Rupp, Müller, and Schwarz. The name Gerig in particular came from the valley of the Emme River north of Bern. The political authorities became quite intolerant of Anabaptists in the latter part of the 17th century, including the practice of sentencing the Anabaptists to become galley slaves. They had two story warships with five galley slaves to each of 26 oar benches to do the rowing. There is a record of a Lieutenant Gerig who transported six of the Anabaptists to Italy who had been sentenced to become galley slaves in 1671. This increased persecution prompted a fairly large migration of Mennonites in 1671 to France and the Palatinate. Our ancestors were probably part of this migration.

ROUTES TO RUSSIA

ALSACE is a region of France with its political center at Strasbourg. Anabaptism was strong in the city until 1534 when active persecution drove them into meeting in the forests and living in the mountains. There was a relatively large influx of Anabaptists from Switzerland in the mid 17th century fleeing persecution. Most settled in the valley of Ste. Marie in the Vosges Mountains. Alsace meanwhile had been decimated by the Thirty Years War (1618 to 1648) and accepted the incoming Anabaptists in efforts to repopulate the area. They were offered an exemption from military service for an annual fee of 45 livres. Most of this group joined the congregations under the leadership of Jakob Ammann. Ammann furnished the authorities a list of Mennonites in the 1690s that included the names Gerig, Müller, and Maurer among others. These Amish-Mennonites prospered through hard work and frugality. Their prosperity aroused envy among their neighbors who brought their presence to the attention of the authorities. The Court of King Louis XIV issued an order that the Mennonites were not to be tolerated due to their unwillingness to adhere to the “Reform Church”. This prompted emigrations to the Palatinate and across the Vosges Mountains to the province of Lorraine governed by the Duchy of Würtemburg. The Gerig family, including Moses Gerig were part of this move to Lorraine to the city of Mömpelgard, or Montbeliard. Other Mennonites stayed in Alsace, some eventually joining the main body of Mennonites in Russia, while others emigrated in the late 1700’s and 1800’s to American as the ancestors of the current Amish settlements in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

MONTBELIARD (Mömpelgard) AND ON TO RUSSIA

Montbeliard is a city in the Lorraine region of current day France. At the time, it was separate from France in the Duchy of Würtemburg.

Emigrants (including the Gerig branch of our family) arrived in 1712. They were settled on the estate of Duke Leopold-Eberhard. He had unscrupulously dispossessed many of his subjects, taking their land for himself and settling the Mennonite refugees on the land. They were good farmers and craftsmen, complained less than the locals, and were willing to work without written contracts and at subsistence level. They were, understandably, resented by their neighbors, so there was little intermarriage and the group maintained its own identity. Church services were organized in the homes, and a church record was started in 1750. Christian Stucki and Maria Kaufmann were married there on May 13, 1787. Moses Gering was a member of a family that lived in Alsace, and records indicate he was baptized here in 1766. On Feb. 8, 1791 a party of Mennonites, including Moses Gering, Christian and Maria Kaufmann Stucki, and Christian and Maria Graber (all direct relatives) left Montbeliard for Poland, entering the service of Prince Adam Czartorinsky, Great General of Podolia. He had inherited estates including Podolia and Volhynia in 1782. When he made a tour of his lands, he found them undeveloped and with the inhabitants living on a subsistence level. He decided to bring in colonists to develop the land. He’d heard of the Mennonites because his daughter was married to Prince Louis of Würtemburg, and he knew of their reputation for diligence and skill in farming.

Records indicate that this group made a stop on their eastward trek with the Mennonite community in Galicia, probably for several months. They proceeded east to settle in Podolia, at a place called Adampol. Over the next few years, in  1793 and again in 1795 there were political partitionings of Poland, so that the province became part of Russia. The Mennonites lost their special protected status when Russia took over as the political authority, so they emigrated back west in 1795 to Urzulin, near Lublin, where they formed the village Michelsdorf. They were joined in 1797 by four families from Galicia (via the Hutterite colony) including our relatives Joseph and Elizabeth Mundlein with their daughter Katherina, and Barbara (Albrecht) and Andreas Schrag with her daughter Anna Albrecht. Several marriages of direct relatives took place in Michelsdorf, including Johann Gering (son of Moses) marriage to Anna Albrecht (1802); Joseph Schrag marriage to Freni Stucki (1803); Christian Stucki marriage to Katherina Mündlein (1807). Johann Gering, Jr. was born in Michelsdorf in 1804, and later became a minister of the congregation.

Because of a hard economic situation, the group entered into a contract in 1807 with Price Edward Lubomirsky in the province of Volhynia. They moved to an area 15 miles west of Dubno, establishing the village of Edwardsdorf, named after the Prince. Others from Michelsdorf moved to to Horodishtz and Waldheim. Most of the Edwardsdorf congragation moved again in 1861 about 160 miles east to Kotosufka and Neumenufka in the Zhitomir district of Volhynia. This moved was apparently prompted by the opportunity to own land which had become scarce in the Edwardsdorf area.

next: The Palatinate (Reinfalz) and subsequent migrations.