Benutzer Diskussion:BenderDG

Greetings from Alberta Canada,

Shortly after my mother passed away in November of 2007 her collection of family photos sparked my interest in putting together a family tree. Then in 2013 on recognizing the worldwide tree building potential of “FindAGrave.com” I decided to post all of that to Find A Grave.

This presented a brand-new problem. Find A Grave had no provisions for selecting birth and/or death locations for the ancestral villages of interest to me such as; Tarutino, Kassel, Johannestal, Paris and so on! Other than the city of Odessa there was no other selection(s) listed for the province (Oblast) of Odes’ka, Ukraine. So in working with Find A Grave’s geography department I was instructed to ask for the inclusion of no more than four at a time current name locations such as; Tarutyne, Velykokomarivka, Ivanivka, Veselyi Kut and so on. Hence the birth of the cross-referencing "Germans from Russia Settlements" list.

In March 2016 upon learning that German-Russia ancestral village locations were not being harbored behind locked doors by various heritage organizations I decided to try my hand at greatly expanding my meager four page list of one hundred and three settlements. At that time I had no idea there were thousands of additional German settlements that extended well beyond the immediate Odessa region, the Crimean peninsula or the area known as Bessarabia. “Good thing I didn’t know then, what I know now.”

Almost immediately this became a labor of love. I was hooked … my household and yard chores were disrupting my time on the computer. Every day was filled with the anticipation of cross-referencing at least twenty to thirty more villages. With Sandy (Schilling) Payne doing the online mapping and regional guidance work in just eight months we had determined the GPS coordinates for twenty-three hundred German-Russia colonies. Pretty good, if I do say so myself.

Descendants of the Germans from Russia and eastern Europe were stirring with anticipation and special requests to pinpoint and include their specific settlement(s) of interest. We in turn complied by giving priority to requests by Dave Grosz, Merv Weiss, Maggie Hein, Mike Grau, Andreas Tissen and others.

Currently the “Germans from Russia and Eastern Europe Settlement Locations” list of 193 pages accounts for 5,453 settlements. It now also includes the German-Polish settlements that were often used as stepping stones for the Germans that later moved on to new colonies in south Russia.

Enjoy, use, download, distribute and/or post the list however you please!

• Germans from Russia and Eastern Europe Settlement Locations

D.G. Bender