 
Mostly We Walked: The Werners from Russia.

One German Family's Story of Immigration

Shirley Werner

Published by Shirley Werner at Smashwords

Copyright 2014 Shirley Werner

First published April 23, 2014

Last modified May 19, 2014
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Table of Contents

Legendary Family History

The German Origins of the First Generation

Bolshoy Tokmak

Pop's German-Russian Parents: Anna Goertz and Adolph Gustav Werner

Exile and Flight

How They Came Over: The S.S. Susquehanna Manifest

The Thiessens and the Mitulskis

Seabrook Farms

Education in Russia, Danzig, and America

The Century Baking Company

Epilogue: Two German-Russian Families with Their Own Unique Stories

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

About the Author
Mostly We Walked: The Werners from Russia. One German Family's Story of Immigration

Legendary Family History

Ernst Oskar Werner, my father's father, born on December 5, 1907, is the man whose immigration story always captured our family's imagination—perhaps because it was the only immigration story we knew in our family, which always assumed (wrongly, it turns out) that most of our other ancestors, both near and distant, were obscure and unknowable. Details of his dramatic story were told again and again around the Werner kitchen table—our family's gathering place, where all significant conversations occurred—stories told almost always in the same way and with the same particulars, until they became the family legend. I now know that some of these cherished details were the product of my father's unintentional creation of his own memories. Everything he recounted to us he firmly believed to be true, but his memory, though it is the sharp memory of an honest, intelligent man, was sometimes based on his own unperceived embellishments, misinterpretations, or reconstruction of the facts that he tried to preserve in his mind.

Pop, as my father, Ernie, called him—we children called him Pop Pop, since he was Daddy's Pop—was born into a German-speaking family who lived in a village named Bolshoy Tokmak, north of the Black Sea in present-day Ukraine. The family had lived in the country they would always call Russia for more than a generation, and they kept their German citizenship by sending their men back to fight in the wars. When World War I came, however, the family were sent as civil prisoners to Siberia. They traveled on cattle cars, and there was hunger: at one point, they were allowed to get off the train, and some people ate grass and vomited. They lived in Siberia until German families were finally allowed to leave. They made a large part of the long journey west out of Siberia on foot. In Moscow, there was a typhus epidemic, and they all came down with the disease, yet all survived; Pop got typhus after his family had mostly recovered, and since there was a quarantine it was forbidden for him to leave the city. But his family hid him in a blanket (says my father) or a basket (as my childish memory has it) and smuggled him out of Moscow. They journeyed to the coastal city of Danzig, then a part of German-speaking Prussia, now Gdansk in modern-day Poland. There, family lore says that they met an American man, C. F. Seabrook, or perhaps met someone who worked for him. Legend has it that "Old Man Seabrook," as the workers at Seabrook Farms called him—his colleagues called him "C. F."—offered them passage to the United States if they would work for a period of time on his farm in New Jersey. It was this promise that gave them the means to come to the United States, and this is how the family came to settle in the town of Bridgeton in southern New Jersey. When they arrived at Ellis Island after their voyage, my father loved to tell us, Pop was the only one of his brothers who did not yet have a middle name, and he was encouraged to choose one. He chose Oskar, which sounded pleasant in German but comically disappointing when pronounced in English. This particular memory about the middle name tickled my father because he always put it together with the fact that Pop's brothers grew to be tall men, each of them almost six feet, and they all had impressive names to go with their impressive heights: Wilhelm Siegfried, Adalbert Konstantine, and Franz Vladimir. Pop, on the other hand, reached only five feet eight inches as an adult, and he had the shortest name to match: Ernst.

It cannot be proven, as a solid and documented fact, that Old Man Seabrook actually made this bargain with my family. His son, John Seabrook (Jack), with whom I talked when he was himself an old man, said that he did not know of his father's ever having gone to Europe to recruit workers in that early period, and the Ellis Island passenger records also seem to tell a different (but itself probably false) story. It is certainly not true that Pop was the only one of his brothers who was christened without a middle name and that he chose one at Ellis Island. His baptismal certificate from Russia shows that he was named Ernst Oscar Werner by his parents (Oscar with a c, although Pop spelled it with a k when he recorded his German name in his handwritten record of his family's history; in America, however, he always spelled Oscar with a c). And no middle names for the Werner family were recorded on the S.S. Susquehanna's manifest, whose image can now be viewed in the Ellis Island archives—so there is nothing to prove that middle names were a particular concern to anyone at that iconic moment in the family's passage.

What follows is an account constructed out of family memories, put together with information from historical archives, books, photographs, maps [Map: Russia], interviews, and websites—plus one family recipe. There are probably legends that still linger undetected in this account, masquerading as facts; and there may be items recorded as fact in extant documents that are either deliberate falsifications or innocent mistakes. In family history, I have learned, what is cherished as a "fact" rarely turns out to be absolutely stable.

The German Origins of the First Generation

Martin Goertz (1847–before 1915) and Maria Link (1847–before 1915) were the parents of Anna Goertz (Görtz) Werner, Pop's mother [Document: Martin and Maria]. Both were born in Marienburg, East Prussia, now Malbork, Poland. On the maps, Marienburg can be seen situated about halfway between Danzig and Elbing [Map: Marienburg, 2 images]; it was considered to be within the greater Danzig region, and so Pop's statement that the Goertzes were married in Danzig may have been a more general way of saying that they were married in Marienburg. An old image shows the fortress in Marienburg, built in 1274 [Marienburg Fortress].

As a young man, Martin Goertz had a promising military career. He served as a soldier in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and was awarded the Iron Cross, a military decoration first awarded in 1813 for bravery in the field during the wars of liberation against Napoleon and later reauthorized by Wilhelm I of Prussia on July 19, 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War. Martin served under field marshals Paul von Hindenburg and Helmuth von Moltke and as paymaster under Otto von Bismarck.1

Despite his military service, Martin found living conditions difficult in East Prussia after the war. He and Maria Link Goertz therefore emigrated from Marienburg to Orenburg, Russia, in 1871 after their marriage. Michael Link, her mother's father, originally of Marienburg, also later moved to Orenburg after his son Martin and another son, Fritz Link, who was doing a butcher business, had moved there [Document: Michael Link]. Thus a part of the family—Maria and her husband, and her brothers and father, presumably with their wives—moved to Orenburg in several stages.

Given the Ukrainian background of Pop's generation, this city is much further east than we might expect a German family to have immigrated to willingly. The earliest Germans who came on a large scale to Russia in 1764–67, after Catherine II (the Great) issued manifestos in 1762 and 1763 to encourage immigration, established colonies in the lower Volga region further to the west around Saratov.2 These colonists became known as the Volga Germans. The colonists were granted religious freedom, self-government, local control of their German-language schools, and freedom from Russian military service and most taxes for a period of time. After that, "the second major phase of immigration started in 1789 and lasted, despite periodic lulls, until 1863";3 most of these Germans went to the Black Sea region in southern Ukraine. "The immigrants were to help secure Russia's borders and develop districts long since fallen into disuse as new areas of commercial productivity. By 1914 there were 3,500 German colonies, and the total German population was estimated at 2,338,500."4 But there were also German colonies around Orenburg, which could be regarded in a sense as the extreme eastern border of the Volga region.5 This early frontier trading and defensive town—founded in 1742 and located on the Ural River, which flows into the Caspian Sea—was situated among steppes inhabited by nomadic herdsmen, the Kazakhs, and was considered to be on the very boundary of Europe and Asia.6 A photograph from the website of Orenburg State University shows what appear to be some of these early inhabitants; the photograph is hard to interpret, but perhaps depicts some tradesmen and their animals or furs [Orenburg traders].7 The region was also home to the Orenburg Cossack Host, formed in 1755 and enlisted as part of the Russian military defensive force. A 1912 photograph shows a fierce-looking (or downright mean) group of Orenburg Cossacks [Orenburg Cossacks 1912], and a 1910 photograph shows Orenburg Cossacks on their camels [Orenburg Cossacks 1910]. On a more settled note, it is not impossible to imagine that the Goertzes and the Links attended the Lutheran Church [Evangelische Kirche in Orenburg].

There is good reason to suppose that Martin and Maria Goertz eventually moved away from the eastern outpost of Orenburg west to the Black Sea area of Ukraine, because they later became acquainted with the Werners. Whether the Links stayed in Orenburg or moved with them is not known.

Ludwig Gustav Werner (ca. 1845–before 1915) and Caroline Klink were the parents of Adolph Gustav Werner, Pop's father [Document: Adolph Gustav Werner, 2 images]. We know only a few facts about Ludwig: where he was born, that he came to Russia when he was fourteen, the names of his children and wife, that he made furniture, and where he died. But these bare facts reveal more than we might at first think. They not only allow us to understand something of the structure of his life, but shed light on—and are in turn illuminated by—the historical circumstances that brought him to Russia.

Ludwig was born in Königsberg, East Prussia, about 120 miles to the east of Danzig.8 The city is now Kaliningrad, in Russia, and is located in the geographically separate part of modern Russia that is between Lithuania and Poland on the Baltic Sea. An old photograph shows a street scene in Königsberg [Königsberg street scene]. The map [Map: Königsberg] shows that the city is situated between the bodies of water identified as the Frische Haff and the Kurische Haff (in the center of the map; the coastal city of Danzig would be just off the map to the left).

Ludwig's birthdate is not known, but a conservative guess can be made based on the ages and number of his children.9 Although only his son Adolph's birthdate (1875) is known with certainty, the birth order of the children—Karl, Heinrich, Adolph Gustav, Amalia (or Amelia), Friedrich, Gotfried, and Gustav—seems reasonably secure, based on the fact that both Al and Pop listed them in that order in their notes. When he was fourteen—perhaps in about 1860—Ludwig emigrated from Königsberg to Russia. It is reasonable to assume that he came with his family.

Although it is not known where Ludwig settled when he first came to Russia, the simplest assumption would be in Ukraine, since his third son, Adolph, was born, married, and had children there. Thus three generations of the Werner family regarded Ukraine as their home until war displaced them. Adolph was born in Valdorf (or Waldorf) in 1875. This seems to have been a village, no longer to be found, that was near Bolshoy Tokmak, where Pop and four of his brothers were born. The name Valdorf is still associated with a place that is just a few miles to the northwest of Bolshoy Tokmak.10 It was probably in this area in the southern Ukraine, north of the Sea of Azov, that Ludwig and his family eventually became acquainted with the Goertzes. Two of Ludwig's sons—Karl, the eldest, and afterwards his third son, Adolph, either in 1901 or 1903—married two of the Goertz sisters, Augusta and Anna. It is likely, then, that Martin and Maria Goertz had moved from Orenburg to Ukraine well before 1901 (or 1903).

Caroline Klink (ca. 1845–before 1915; her birthdate is also a guess), who became Ludwig Werner's wife and was thus Pop's paternal grandmother, was born in Russia of German parents who had emigrated from Bavaria and spoke the Swabian dialect. On the dialect map [Map: Swabian dialect], the palest blue marks the area—Baden-Württemberg and the western part of Bavaria—where Swabian has traditionally been spoken. The Klinks therefore came from western Bavaria, in southern Germany, in the first half of the nineteenth century, during the earlier wave of immigration into the Black Sea area. The fact that the family had come from southern Germany rather than the northern region of Prussia is consistent with what we know about other early German immigrants to Ukraine who were not Mennonites: they came from all over the German empire. We do not know whether Caroline's father was a farmer or whether he practiced a trade.

Bolshoy Tokmak

Knowing that many German families had been encouraged to immigrate to Ukraine in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because they were perceived to be exemplary settlers and farmers, and knowing that the Ukrainian Werners preserved a German ethnic identity and spoke German as their mother tongue, I had always assumed that Bolshoy Tokmak was a small German village and that most of its inhabitants, including my ancestors, were peasant farmers. A 2003 book, _Cross-Cultural Encounters on the Ukrainian Steppe_ , by John R. Staples, has revealed that the history of this town incorporates more ethnic and economic diversity than I had imagined, and that the lives of the various ethnic groups who have lived here were intimately intertwined with the natural environment.11 A detail from an old map shows Oriekov (Orekhov) on the northern border of the Taurida Governorate in Ukraine, with (Bolshoy) Tokmak to the south [Map: Orekhov]. Taganrog, another Ukrainian town whose name was sometimes mentioned by the family, is to the east. The map of Ukraine shows the area in its larger geographical context; note Volhynia Province, which will play a role in the story of Germans in Russia, in the northwest corner of that map [Map: Ukraine].

Bolshoy Tokmak is situated on the Tokmak River, one of three major tributaries of the Molochna River. The lowlands of the Molochna River basin are arid "wormwood steppe, characterized in their natural state by sparse growths of wormwood grass and, in places along the coast, salt-marsh grass." The uplands, by contrast, where Bolshoy Tokmak is located, are very fertile and have somewhat higher levels of precipitation than the lowlands. They are "characterized in their natural state by a luxuriant growth of feather grass intermixed with timothy, spear, and broom grass, wild oats, wild rye, and wild wheat."12 This feather-grass steppe is a beautiful sight when the wind blows [Feather-grass steppe].

The Molochna River Basin, formerly part of the Ottoman Empire, became part of the Russian Empire on April 8, 1783, when it was annexed by Catherine II.13 Catherine formed a policy of controlled immigration. She permitted a number of diverse peoples to inhabit the New Russian territory: semi-nomadic Turkic-speaking Muslims, the Nogai Tatars, who lived in yurts and counted their wealth in sheep;14 Russian Orthodox settlers from overpopulated inland areas; members of two pacifist Russian religious sects—Doukhobors and Molokans—who had parted with Orthodoxy in their belief that every Christian has the inherent potential for direct contact with God, and who therefore rejected the hierarchies of church and state; and German-speaking Mennonites, Catholics, and Lutherans. The Mennonites were Anabaptists who came to Molochna primarily from the region of Danzig and Elbing. "At the time of immigration about 38 per cent [of the Mennonites] identified themselves as craftsmen, while nearly all came from rural areas where they had traditionally practiced mixed farming with an emphasis on dairying." The other German-speaking colonists, of whom three-quarters were Catholic and one-quarter were Lutheran, "came from all over the German states; an 1836 account lists immigrants from places as diverse as Württemberg, Nassau, Pomerania, Prussia, and Mecklenburg. Only 10 per cent came from cities, while about 65 per cent identified themselves as craftsmen."15

Bolshoy Tokmak, founded in 1784, was not a German village; it was in fact the first Orthodox state peasant village established in the Molochna River basin.16 In a pattern that was typical of later Orthodox settlements, the village itself was long and narrow, stretching along the river "to ensure that each household had its piece of the invaluable flood plain."17 This settlement, "on a rich stretch of bottomland on the Tokmak River, was in the 1830s the largest settlement in the Molochna River Basin by a substantial margin. Although formally designated as just another agricultural village, in 1844 it had fifteen windmills, two watermills, three oil presses, a large tallow factory, a candle-making factory, and a brick and tile factory. Its approximately 6,700 residents included nine blacksmiths, twenty-six shoemakers (six of them German colonists), five hatmakers, sixteen weavers, sixteen tailors (six of them Jews), seventeen millers, two butchers, fifteen potters, nine tanners, two carriage-makers (both German colonists), one watchmaker (German), and six coopers. A further 126 families were engaged part-time in one or another of these trades as an adjunct to farming."18

By 1844, overgrazing had already "created a nearly barren stretch of land extending a kilometre around the village."19 Because villages of colonists "owned their land collectively, and individual allotments could not be subdivided, mortgaged, or sold outside the settlement,"20 the natural growth of population led gradually to a shortage of land. By 1844, more than half of the inhabitants of Bolshoy Tokmak owned only a "hand's-breadth" of land.21 The opening of a port at Berdiansk, about forty miles east of Molochna, opened up possibilities for trade, and fairs came to play a major role in this developing economy. In the mid-nineteenth century, "the 9 May Bolshoi Tokmak fair was the great event of the year in Molochna. Mennonites and other German-speaking settlers, Orthodox state peasants, and Nogai mingled with Jewish hatmakers from Kherson, Tatar wine merchants from the Crimea, wool buyers from Kharkov, and hide buyers from Moscow. Booths selling wine, vodka, tobacco, perfume, makeup, glassware, and pottery did brisk business, while weary shoppers could stop to take in a performance by travelling comedy troupes."22

Demographic changes continued to transform this Black Sea region in the mid-nineteenth century. The Russian Doukhobors, whose rejection of religious hierarchy was so deep seated that they considered even the authority of the Bible to be obsolete, ultimately were exiled to the Caucasus in 1841; "the exile was officially justified as [the result of a failed] attempt to convert the sectarians to Orthodoxy."23 Their large landholdings were reallotted to Orthodox peasants. In the 1850s mixed villages of Jewish and Mennonite colonists were established "on crown land outside the original Mennonite allotment. The Russian state intended the project to provide Mennonite farmers as models to educate Jewish settlers who were inexperienced with agriculture."24 The Nogai never adopted the sedentary existence that the Russian officials had wanted them to adopt in their attempt to "civilize" these Muslim herders. They obtained permission to leave in 1860, emigrating to Turkey with a large group of Nogai who had formerly lived in the Caucasus; by January 1862 only twenty Nogai persons were left in Molochna. Their grazing land "reverted to the state, which assigned much of it to Bulgarian colonists." The liberation of the Russian serfs in 1861 led to a "large, uncontrolled illegal influx of [Russian] peasants into Molochna following the emancipation proclamation."25

Yet foreign immigration into Russia, especially from Prussia, was tightly controlled, so we must not imagine that the young Ludwig Werner came to the Molochna basin illegally or unnoticed. In his book, Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union, Eric Lohr writes: "The German border was the most important of all Russia's borders. ... The perceived need to hold Russian subjects in and to prevent Poles from crossing the border during and after the Polish rebellion of 1831 led to the construction of walls, double-ditches, and guard patrols on the Russian side and comparable measures in Prussia, eventually making the Prussian border with the Russian Empire the most carefully marked and guarded of all Russian borders, and possibly of all borders in Europe." The reason for this was not hostility but a mutual desire to create an "effective means for the direct administrative negotiation for the return of conscription-evaders, vagrants, and political and criminal suspects." In contrast to the disfavored Poles, "most German-speakers were valued as productive farmers, industrialists, investors, and craftsmen. Decades of relative peace and alliance between the Russian Empire, the Habsburg Empire and the German states greatly facilitated favorable policies toward German immigration and toward resolving differences over matters of citizenship and naturalization."26

In the 1860s several now nearly "forgotten great reforms" were launched in Russian immigration policy by Czar Alexander II. A law of June 7, 1860, "declared the principle that 'all foreigners coming to Russia for trade, agriculture and industry were granted the same rights [in civil law] enjoyed by Russian subjects.'" The laws "relaxed passport requirements and police oversight and granted a series of new rights to foreigners, especially foreign merchants, in Russia."27 "The initiators of the reform clearly planned for a radical break with the past, as a means to open up the country to foreigners who would help in the drive to industrialize and modernize the country. ... While the eighteenth-century policy aimed to draw farmers to populate and till the steppe, the 1860s reforms of subjecthood and naturalization aimed primarily at drawing investors, engineers, merchants, and skilled workers."28 There were, nonetheless, reasons for such people to choose to retain their foreign citizenship. Military conscription was one such reason. In 1874, universal military service was introduced for Russian male citizens, even for the earlier colonists who had settled in Russia with a promise of exemption. This led to an exodus from Russia of Mennonites—who were pacifists—and many other ethnic German colonists who had gained Russian citizenship.29

Another reason for Germans and other settlers to retain their foreign citizenship in Russia was diplomatic protection. "A foreigner contemplating naturalization might well conclude that diplomatic channels of appeal and bilateral agreements between his or her native state might provide greater personal and property protection than he would exercise as a Russian subject (former subjecthood could not be kept upon naturalization in Russia). The 1860s reforms gave foreigners nearly all the rights of subjecthood without the obligations. If the only thing to be gained through naturalization was new obligations, then why naturalize?"30

The demand for craftsmen and industrial workers in Russia may explain why, and even give indirect evidence for when, Ludwig Werner and (probably) his parents immigrated to Ukraine. The fact that his family never became Russian citizens—his son, Adolph, was born in Ukraine but served in the Prussian army—also fits in with this narrative. Ludwig came to Russia perhaps around 1860 or earlier. He became a cabinet maker. That his son Adolph also became a skilled woodworker tempts me to wonder whether Ludwig may have learned the trade as part of a family tradition passed down by his own father. "He [Ludwig] made furniture and sold it door to door from a wagon. This is how he met his wife,"31 the Swabian-speaking Caroline Klink. Ludwig therefore fits in with the majority of German Lutheran and Catholic immigrants to the Molochna basin, who, unlike most Mennonites, practiced an artisanal trade rather than farming.

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to construct a coherent account of where Ludwig and Caroline spent their latter years. At the outbreak of World War I, the older German people living in the Ukrainian villages or towns near Bolshoy Tokmak were said to have been exiled to Ufa.32 Although I do not know exactly where the elder Goertzes and Werners had been living in Ukraine before they were sent to Ufa, Uncle Al said that his two sets of grandparents had not seen each other for some fifteen years before they met again in exile. I have never learned why the elders were exiled to a place different from their families' place of exile. But Ludwig's youngest son, Gustav, who was not yet married, went to Ufa to care for his parents and stayed with them until they died. His sister-in-law Anna learned from him that her parents, Martin and Maria Goertz, were also buried there.

Pop's German-Russian Parents: Anna Goertz and Adolph Gustav Werner

Anna Goertz, daughter of Martin Goertz and Maria Link, was born January 23, 1883, in Russia; she died February 5, 1951, in Bridgeton, New Jersey. Although the name of the city, town, or village in or near which she was born is not remembered, other family memories and the 1930 and 1940 census records preserve solid evidence that she was born in Russia. Her parents had settled in the frontier town of Orenburg when newly married in 1871, but at some point well before 1901 or 1903 we have concluded that the Goertz family had moved west to Ukraine, where Augusta, one of Anna's sisters, met and married Karl, Adolph's eldest brother. The S.S. Susquehanna manifest states that Anna was born in Samara, a city on the east bank of the Volga River, in Russia, but there are several reasons to doubt this claim—not least because the manifest identifies "Germany" as the country in which this town or city was located. We do not seem to have any further evidence to show whether Anna was born in Orenburg, in Samara, or in Ukraine.

Anna married Adolph in either 1901 or 1903, probably the former. Pop recorded the year as 1903 [Document: Anna's marriage and children, 3 images], but on the 1930 census Anna reported her age at marriage as 18, which would make 1901 the year of her marriage. This also seems to have been the year when Adolph returned from military service. Pop's daughter, Shirley Anna Werner (Aunt Shirley), remembered her grandmother saying that she had first seen her future husband in church and admired him. Her sister had married his brother; the families therefore already knew each other well, and their marriage was arranged by her parents. Al's father told him that they were married in Taganrog, but in another place he noted that they were married in Ekaterinoslav. Although these two claims seem to conflict with each other, they do not, since the town of Taganrog—on the Gulf of Taganrog at the northeast of the Sea of Azov—was at that time considered to be in the province of Ekaterinoslav.

Anna bore seven children, all boys. Wilhelm Siegfried was born December 25, 1903, in Orekhov (modern name Orikhiv), Ukraine. Five more sons—Adalbert Konstantin, b. November 5, 1905; Ernst Oscar, b. December 5, 1907; unnamed twins, who were born and died within a week in 1909; and Franz Vladimir, b. June 9, 1912, were all born in Bolshoy Tokmak, about twenty-five miles south of Orekhov. Anna and Adolph's youngest child, George, was born February 19, 1917, in Tutschky, northern Siberia, and died there.

Like his father, Adolph Werner (b. October 27, 1875, in Waldorf; d. May 14, 1924, in Bridgeton) pursued an artisanal career as a skilled carpenter. And, like his future father-in-law, he saw Prussian military service, although unlike Martin Goertz he did not fight in any war. A photograph taken in 1899 shows him in uniform holding what looks like a mug of dark beer [Adolph in uniform]. During his military service, Adolph learned to speak High German. Although Russian and other languages—probably including Yiddish and other Germanic dialects—were spoken in Bolshoy Tokmak, the family spoke their own dialect of German at home.33 Another photograph, a Cabinet Portrait probably taken in 1904 judging by the baby's apparent age, shows Anna, Adolph, and their infant son, Wilhelm [Anna, Adolph, and Wilhelm].

Adolph worked in a furniture factory and in a farm machinery factory in Bolshoy Tokmak. Uncle Albert "said he remembers they couldn't make enough at his factory. He believes it was the Kleinert Co. The only other factory in town making machinery was the Fuchs Co."34 The names of these companies suggest that they may have been owned by Germans. German ownership, and the fact that the Werners worked in these factories, would be consistent with the overall picture of early industrialization in Russia. "Russian industrialization from the 1890s on depended very heavily on direct foreign investment and import of managers, entrepreneurs, and technicians, especially from Germany. Foreign investment accounted for nearly half of all new capital formation in industrial corporations, and by 1914 foreigners held over 40 percent of the nominal capital of corporations operating in Russia. At the turn of the century, a third of all technicians in Russian industry and a tenth of all administrative personnel were foreign subjects."35

Yet there were clearly Russian influences also in the Werners' lives. Adolph's sister, Amalia, married a Russian named Alexander, and Adolph and Anna chose a Russian middle name for their youngest son, Franz Vladimir. Anna's cooking also included Ukrainian dishes. The dish that had the most profound influence on later generations of the Werner family was vareniky [Vareniky]. In The Art of Russian Cuisine, Anne Volokh writes, "Vareniki are one of those cozy, homey dishes that everyone loves, and in some people they have even been known to inspire an irresistible craving. The son of the world-renowned basso Feodor Chaliapin told me that once, when he and his father were strolling along the Champs Élysée in Paris, Chaliapin suddenly announced, 'I am dying for farmer's cheese vareniki.' Vareniki in Paris? Indeed, fifteen minutes later they were seated at a table in an émigré restaurant, placing an order for farmer's cheese vareniki."36 This vareniky craving is a phenomenon that affects many who have grown up with it. We great-grandchildren in the Werner family passionately embraced vareniky as our favorite food throughout our childhoods; making these mouthwatering dumplings, which were served dripping with melted butter and generously sprinkled with salt, was always a festive, all-day family affair. At dinner we would keep count of how many each had eaten, eat until we could eat no more, and then rest and try again. Leftover vareniky, if you are lucky enough to have any, can be fried in the morning for breakfast and must be scrupulously portioned out. Yet this beloved family tradition was preserved through the most tenuous of threads. Anna did not use or write down recipes. Aunt Shirley's daughters did not like cheese, so after her marriage Shirley never made vareniky. However, she had learned to make it in her childhood from her grandmother, and she taught my mother how, doubtless at my father's request; it was my mother who preserved the recipe and supervised the household making of the vareniky, and my father, the baker's son, who kneaded the dough and refined the technique.37

Exile and Flight

After Russia declared war on Germany on July 19, 1914, life quickly changed for the worse for ethnic Germans and foreigners living in the Russian Empire under Czar Nicholas II. A system of "tighter documentation, registration, identification, and control over foreigners was applied" to people whose ethnic origins were not Russian, and especially to those who were citizens of enemy countries.38 Lohr's book _Russian Citizenship_ gives a detailed picture of the debate that played out between the Russian government and the Russian military command in regard to people who were citizens of countries with which Russia was now at war.

"The army and the Ministry of Internal Affairs ... embark[ed] upon a radical set of measures to arrest and intern all enemy subjects from a large swath of the empire. On July 26, 1914, the minister of internal affairs ordered the arrest of all enemy subjects on Russian soil who were either enlisted in enemy armies or in their reserves. They were sent to four internal Russian provinces for internment as POWs. On July 29, the Ministry of Internal Affairs expanded the definition of those to be interned to include all German and Austrian males aged eighteen to forty-five capable of carrying a weapon. These groups were designated 'civilian deportees' and as such fell outside protections granted by treaty to POWs. The deportation of this category affected only a small part (about 50,000) of the roughly 600,000 enemy subjects with permanent residency in the Russian Empire.

"However, as early as September 1914 the army began to order the deportation of civilian enemy aliens from regions near the front, starting with 7,000 enemy subjects from Riga. On December 13, 1914, the army ordered the deportation of all Austro-Hungarian, German, and Ottoman subjects (including women and children) from the ten provinces of the former Kingdom of Poland. In the course of the next three months, similar orders targeted Volynia and parts of the Baltic region.

"At a special meeting of the Council of Ministers in October 1914, the minister of war proposed arresting and interning enemy subjects not only in the front-zone areas under military rule, but throughout the entire empire. The civilian ministers opposed this proposal, arguing that it would undo decades of interconnected economic relationships, causing both temporary and permanent damage to the economy, as well as spurring costly retaliations against Russian subjects abroad. In the end, the ministers limited deportation and internment of enemy subjects from areas under civilian rule to retaliations against specific new German and Austrian measures against Russian subjects abroad, and proposed a series of exemptions for Slavs, continuous residents of the empire for twenty-five years or more, and those with relatives in the army. The army command was disappointed that the civilian authorities were unwilling to arrest and deport all enemy subjects, but proceeded with a sweeping program of mass deportations not only in the theatre of military operations, but throughout much of the vast area that had been declared under military rule.

"... [O]nce the deportations were under way, Russia applied the policy to hundreds of thousands of its own subjects, forcibly expelling at least half a million Jews and a quarter million Russian-subject German farmers from the zones under military rule to interior Russian provinces."39

In the summer of 1914, when the first measures against enemy subjects were enacted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Adolph was 38 years old. Although his military service in the Prussian army belonged to the past, he nonetheless still fell within the category of "German and Austrian males aged eighteen to forty-five capable of carrying a weapon." He and other adult men of German citizenship living in areas of Ukraine that were under military rule were to be exiled and interned "in camps in Viatka, Orenburg, and Vologda [Provinces]. ... The Ministry of [Internal Affairs] took over responsibility for the oversight of these deportees ... and within days of the military order, expanded the operation to the whole empire.

"To carry out these first mass deportations of the war, the Ministry of Internal Affairs set up a series of staging points in major cities throughout the empire, using jails, guarded barracks, or makeshift camps. From these points, the deportees were sent in sealed freight cars under armed guard to one of the designated provinces."40 Adolph was sent to Orenburg Province. His family, seemingly protected by the Ministry of Internal Affairs's July 26, 1914, circular that declared that "peacefully occupied Austrians and Germans who are outside any suspicion may remain in their places [of residence] and retain the protection of our laws, or they may leave the country,"41 remained in Bolshoy Tokmak. With Adolph in Siberia, they would not have wanted to leave the country; and where would they have gone? To abandon their men in exile, to go to a land in which they had never set foot and into an uncertain fate, must not have seemed a real choice for most families.

Then, "on September 21, 1914, the Ministry of Internal Affairs banned local officials from granting any enemy subject the right to leave the area of his or her residence."42 "A decree of February 2, 1915 ... forced enemy subjects living within a broad zone roughly incorporating the territories of modern Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Finland, the Baltic region, and the Caucasus to sell their properties by certain deadlines or face expropriation without compensation. These measures were also applied to Russian-subject German descendants of immigrants from the enemy states living in rural farming communities within the ten Polish provinces and a 160-kilometer band to the interior of the empire's western and southern borders from Finland to the Caspian Sea."43 Contradictory measures were passed in different areas of the empire. Despite the ban that had been posted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs against the emigration of enemy subjects from the empire, "the head of the Kiev Military District posted a declaration that all enemy subjects, regardless of age or sex, had to leave the empire by February 28, 1915, or face deportation to the Russian interior."44 "In April 1915, under army pressure, the Department of Police added its own network of security zones throughout the country, including twenty- to fifty-verst zones on both sides of strategic railways, around hundreds of factories working for defense, and along coastlines and rivers. Civilian authorities were required to deport all enemy subjects—including Slavs [an otherwise favored group], women, and children—from these zones. Any excluded individual appearing in the zones could be charged with treason and tried by military court. As the war progressed, the zones tended to expand to include more areas farther behind the front. By the summer of 1915, deportation orders encompassed all enemy subjects without exception in most areas under army rule and within a broad set of exclusion zones throughout the country, as well as all males of military service age throughout the empire."45 But "several influential military officials were not satisfied and pushed for a maximalist program—what might be called the 'hard line' on deportations." Prince Feliks Iusupov wrote a memo to the czar in June 1915 that "proposed constructing concentration camps to which all enemy subjects without exception (and also Russian subjects with German names) would be sent for the duration of the war." Although this proposal was not implemented, an "internal memo within the headquarters of the General Staff expressed a version of the hard line on deportations: 'Not a single German or Austrian subject alive can or should be considered harmless. All must be investigated, and this will be expensive for the government and likely unsuccessful.'"46

Under one pretext or another the German families in Ukraine were destined for Siberia. In 1915, Anna and other German women and children were sent to join their husbands and fathers as civil prisoners. They were shipped in cattle cars with slats that allowed the air to pass through. They not only must have suffered from exposure, but they were apparently not fed often, or perhaps at all. Once, when the train stopped and they were allowed to pour out of the cars into a meadow, some people were so hungry that they ate grass and then vomited. I do not remember that Pop mentioned how long the journey took, but Lohr writes that during the forced migrations of the war deportees "often arrived [in the interior or Siberian provinces] after weeks in cramped, sealed, infectious boxcars."47 According to the Russian Military Railroad Transit Division, 68,000 enemy subjects were deported by train in 1914; 134,000 in 1915; 41,278 in 1916; and 11,511 in 1917. "These statistics include only some of the tens of thousands who were expelled from Moscow, Petrograd, and the network of security zones throughout the country." If we also include "individuals who traveled by their own means to avoid deportation under guard ... approximately half of the 600,000 enemy subjects registered as permanent residents of the Russian Empire were deported, then interned in camps or assigned to live in specific areas and placed under police oversight during the war. The vast majority of those exempted [from deportation] were Slavs, while the deportation of German, Jewish, Turkish, and Hungarian enemy subjects was remarkably thorough. ... Governors of several western and southern provinces reported that every single German and Jewish enemy subject had been deported."48

A map from Eric Lohr's book, _Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I_ , shows the major internment sites of civil prisoners [Map: Internment sites of enemy civilians].49 Of the exiles, "only a fraction were actually imprisoned or kept in camps. Most were simply registered in interior or Siberian provinces. Nearly every province in Russia received forced migrants and refugees in significant numbers. Petitions and letters from enemy aliens of all types often mention that the fact of their deportation alone created a strong stigma and assumption among locals that they were a dangerous element, guilty of spying or criminal activity."50 Pop remembered atrocities that were later committed by both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks against people in his village who were accused of spying (presumably for the Germans) after the revolution broke out in 1918. He, his mother, and his brothers had joined Adolph in a Siberian village in the Ural Mountains about 100 or 150 miles to the east of Orenburg.51 Pop recorded the name of the place as "Tatshky," while Ernie and Al remembered that it was pronounced "Touch key." This village, which I have not found on any map, was near a creek or river with high banks. It is tempting to connect it with a German village called Tschutschino or Tutschkino that was once known in Siberia in the Borodinowsk district of Omsk Province. Tutschkino was founded by Black Sea Germans. In 1928 it still had a population of 279, but the precise geographical location of that village is no longer clearly known, and Omsk may be too far east of Orenburg to fit with the family's memory of their village's location.52 In referring to the place where the Werners lived I will use the name Tutschky, rather than Tutschkino, respecting Pop's and Uncle Al's memory of their village's name and pronunciation and acknowledging that the identification of Tutschky with Tutschkino has no secure basis.

The elderly people from the Ukrainian German-Russian population—including Caroline Werner, who was born in Russia, and Ludwig Werner, Martin Goertz, and Maria Goertz, who had all lived in Russia for more than forty years—were sent not to Orenburg or Tutschky but to Ufa, further to the north and some distance east of Orenburg. A remarkable early color photograph of Ufa was taken by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, a photographer and chemist, in 1910 [Ufa in 1910].53 Prokudin-Gorsky used a technique in which the subject was photographed in black and white through three color filters. The three resulting images could then be viewed through a projector or an optical device or could be printed using inks. It is strange to think that the sunny, seemingly peaceful town in the photograph was a Siberian place of exile and that all of Pop's grandparents would live out the rest of their lives there. The town must have been thought to be defensively critical, because later Adolph was made to go there and dig trenches around it.

In Tutschky, Adolph made chairs and built log houses. His son Adalbert (Uncle Al) tended sheep and geese, worked in a blacksmith shop and cabinet shop, and looked after his Uncle Jacob, Anna's youngest brother. Adolph's youngest son, George, was born on February 19, 1917, but died before the family left Siberia. That same year George was born the villagers were made aware of the Russian Revolution when soldiers came to the village and forced all the men of German descent to go dig trenches around Ufa. The rest of the story is best told in Pop's words (in the transcription below, I have retained Pop's spelling, but have fixed unintended slips by supplying corrections in square brackets [Letter: The Russian revolution, 6 images]).

Dear Shirley,

Yes I was in Russia during the revolution. We were in Siberia as civil prisoners. We lived in a village called Tatshky about a hundred and fifty miles east of Oranburg. The name Oranburg has been changed to Kubishev.

In 1917 we were made aware of the revolution when a bunch of soldiers came to the village and forced all the men of German decent to go dig trenches around Ufa. My father had to go, when he got back three month[s] later his fingers were frostbitten from walking the last twenty miles accross the step that's prairy.

The next thing our village was ocupied by the bolshoviks later they were driven out by the menchoviks they in turn were driven out by the bolshoviks. We were under rifle and cannon fire three times. One time it was kind of heavy cannon shells were falling all around us as we were running for the creek for safty, the creek bed was very deep and you could feel safe there. One time a cannon shell hit a chimny about twenty feet bihind us.

The biggest canon they had then were three inch, but the[y] had a lot of them.

The word bolshovik meant the mojarity and Menchevik meant minority, they were the rich, the land owners, the polititions and the educaters.

As in every war there were many murders and killings—Like when the mentchoviks murdered one of the villegers by gauging out his eyes before they killed him, and the bolshoviks dragging a man up and down a street with a horse tied by his feet and cuting a mans head of[f] with a sword who they thougt was a spy.

Early in 1918 we were allowed to leave Siberia so we did. We left by sleigh and then walked then [went] in freight cars then walked and walked—we must have walked a thousand miles before we got to Germany, it was 1919 when we got there.

We were in Moscow for about four months where we all got tyfus, but we lived through it all. There were corp[s]es stacked in open sheds, big truck[s] rumbled in loaded them like cordwood and took them away, where? I never knew.

Now we have the same thing going on all over Africa, the Middle east and latin America—

It was quite an experiants that I would not like to live through again.

Well, have a good time in North Carolina.

Like you, we had a terrible winter here also. But its breaking up now.

I have been feeling kind of whoozy lately guess I'm getting old.

With lots of love

Pop.

My imagination has always been so preoccupied with the family's struggle to survive that I have rarely tried to relate to it, with any precision, the larger historical events that were unfolding in 1918 and 1919. Pop's own letter gives an impression of chaos. But these larger events had everything to do with the family's release from exile in Siberia and with their trek across Russia. Czar Nicholas II, who had ruled since 1894, was forced to abdicate on March 2, 1917, after the February Revolution. Within two weeks after the Provisional Government began enacting legislation, "it published what might well be considered the most fundamental decree of the revolution: 'The Abolition of Restrictions Based on Religion and Nationality.' 'Holding the unshakeable conviction that in a free country all citizens should be equal before the law and that the conscience of the people cannot accept the limitation in rights of any individual citizens on the grounds of religion or origins, the Provisional Government decrees the abolition of all restrictions in currently existing laws and regulations on the rights of Russian citizens on the basis of their religion or nationality.'"54 This decree sweepingly revoked discriminatory laws and decrees that had restricted residence, travel, ownership of property, the use of non-Russian languages in education, and other rights that had been restricted for citizens whose religion was not Orthodox or whose ethnic origin was not Russian. Article 9 also abolished laws and regulations that discriminated against foreign citizens in Russia on the basis of religion or nationality. There was, however, one group that was not protected: "the citizens or subjects of enemy states."

"Treatment of 'enemy aliens' shows how the decree heightened the importance of the boundary between citizens and foreigners. The general principle was to immediately repeal all laws restricting the rights of Russian citizens. ... As early as March 11, 1917, the government voided fifteen wartime laws restricting the rights of Russian-subject German 'colonists.' Thousands of Russian-subject Germans and Jews who had been expelled by military order from the front zones and other regions to the interior of the country began to return to their homes. Military officials pushed back on this and succeeded in getting the government to issue a decree on April 21 that required local officials to acquire permission from the military authorities for every individual to return to areas under military rule. However, these orders seem to have been broadly flouted, and many thousands of Russian-subject civilians made their way back to their homes. ... In contrast, officials seem to have had more success holding deported enemy subject civilians in their places of internment, though here too it took strong army intervention to assert the policy.

"However, at the same time, the government kept many of the restrictive wartime laws in place for citizens of enemy states. Both in the countryside and in the urban economy, the Provisional Government continued to press ahead with programs to liquidate enemy-subject properties and financial holdings. The scale of the liquidations the new government completed during its brief period in power was very significant."55

If the Werners had been Russian citizens—like many of the Volhynia ethnic Germans living near Poland,56 who had also been deported to Siberia—they might have been allowed to leave Siberia after the February revolution. Or, like the Volga Germans in the interior, with their long history of Russian citizenship, they may never have been sent to Siberia at all. Instead, not only did Anna and the children remain in Tutschky as civil prisoners, but Adolph was subjected to forced labor. Any property, possessions, or savings the Werners may formerly have had in Ukraine had presumably long since been "liquidated." Yet the family's escape from Siberia ultimately was the indirect consequence of another strange twist in the turbulant fortunes of the parties involved in the revolution. Vladimir Lenin, who had been living in exile in Switzerland, returned with fellow Marxists to Russia in April 1917. When the Bolsheviks were outlawed by the Provisional Government later that summer Lenin again went briefly into exile, in Finland, but he returned in October, and the Bolsheviks gained political power. On March 3, 1918, Lenin's proposal that Russia withdraw from the European war was realized through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Russia was no longer at war with Germany. It was this formal cessation of military hostilities that led to the German-subject Russians' being allowed to leave Siberia. Article 18 of the treaty stated that "interned or deported civil prisoners ... shall be repatriated free of charge, as soon as possible, in so far as they do not desire, with the consent of that state in which they are located, to remain within its boundaries, or to leave for another country. ... A return may be refused only for reasons of the internal safety of the state. As evidence a passport will suffice, issued by the authorities of the home country. ... A visa on the passport is not necessary."57

Thus the ethnic Germans who had retained their German citizenship were free to leave Russia, if they survived the ordeals of the journey west, while those ethnic Germans who had gained Russian citizenship—and whose religious freedom and other newly restored rights now seemed to be protected against discrimination under the new laws—were, paradoxically, not allowed to leave Russia. These Germans would suffer persecution under Stalin beginning in the 1930s, and hundreds of thousands would die of starvation or in forced labor camps. Those who survived would slowly assimilate into Russian society.58

When the Werners and other German families left Tutschky in early 1918 they traveled "as individual families. Mostly it was walking, sometimes they would get a ride on a wagon. They went from one town to another working, begging, and living on welfare (given by individuals)."59 "We left by sleigh and then walked then [went] in fraight cars and then walked and walked—we must have walked a thousand miles before we got to Germany, it was 1919 when we got there." Just as they had been shipped to Siberia in cattle or freight cars, so a part of their journey out was by freight car. But mostly they walked. Many years later, Aunt Shirley wrote down her memory of a conversation she had with her grandmother Anna. "When I was old enough to notice I asked my Grandmother, 'Where is your wedding ring?' 'I sold it for a loaf of bread,' she replied."60

They reached Moscow in late 1918 or early 1919. In that major city, as elsewhere throughout Russia, the continuing revolution was creating chaos. Lenin was often there; he had moved the government from Petrograd to Moscow on March 10, 1918, after Russia's withdrawal from the European war. Contemporary photographs—of the Borodino Bridge, Pushkin Square, and the Sukharevsky Market in the 1920s, and of Lenin leaving Red Square [Lenin in Red Square, May 25, 1919]—while not showing the devastations either of the war or of the epidemic, give an impression of what the city of Moscow looked like at that time.

"In the harsh winter of 1917–1918, at the very dawn of Soviet power, the greatest typhus epidemic in history was beginning in war-torn, destitute Russia. ... Beginning in the cities and central provinces, epidemic typhus spread beyond the Urals to Siberia and Central Asia by late 1919, and engulfed the entire country by 1920."61 The outbreaks follow a seasonal trajectory, peaking from January through May. The Werners must have come down with the disease at the peak of the worst typhus season in the winter of 1918–19, as Pop recalled bodies piled in open sheds outdoors, to be carted away like cords of wood. Anna, Uncle Bill, Uncle Al, and Uncle Francis got sick first. Uncle Al "woke up in a Russian soldier's hospital where one of the soldiers wanted to throw him out of the window but he was stopped."62 This incident seems to show that deep-seated Russian hatred of Germans was still prevalent despite the armistice with Germany: in May 1915, after the outbreak of the war, there had been a "three-day riot and strike against German and foreign businesses in Moscow."63 While Anna and the other boys were recovering, Adolph and, finally, Pop came down with typhus. When the chance arose for the family to take a train from Moscow to Danzig, Pop had not yet fully recovered. Since there was a quarantine, his mother wrapped him in a blanket—or hid him in a basket—and smuggled him onto the train, where the family had obtained sleeping berths.

The body louse, which lives in clothing, is responsible for transmitting typhus. It had been known since 1906 that typhus occurred only when lice were present. During the Russian epidemic, "Civilian and military authorities and most of the public were fully aware of the role of lice in the transmission of typhus, and louse control was the major public tool. ... In the absence of specific therapy, rest and symptomatic treatment were all that were available. No cure was more effective than good nursing and supportive care."64 Patients "were to be moved to clean hospitals and deloused before admission." Their clothes were disinfected with steam, dry heat, or chemicals. In Russia, "public health and military authorities tried to keep infected populations away from vulnerable areas but with little success. ... Officials attempted to control railway passengers and on 6 December 1919 proclaimed a week of cleaning railway stations. Special attention to the railways was an essential feature of the anti-typhus campaign. By November 1919, for example, disinfection teams were treating 40–50,000 passengers daily in Moscow train stations. Eventually, the Soviet government set up some 250,000 beds for typhus patients and erected about 300 isolation and disinfection stations along the railways and waterways. Hundreds of bathing and disinfection detachments were created in the military to delouse the troops. The Russian Red Cross also provided similar facilities."65 Clearly such efforts were already underway in the winter of 1918–19, when the Werners escaped from Moscow. When they arrived in Danzig, "all the Russians getting off the train were herded somewhere (not too clear how it was done) and de-loused!" Perhaps this experience was what Pop recalled when he told Helen that they were once given paper clothing to wear.66

Enormous political and demographic changes were soon to come to the port city of Danzig, which had been a part of the Kingdom of Prussia since 1814. Three months after that August day on which the Werners embarked for New York from Danzig, and a little more than a year after the first World War ended, the Freie Stadt Danzig (Free City of Danzig) was created on November 20, 1920, as a result of the Treaty of Versailles. The city and surrounding area, sandwiched between the newly independent nation of Poland on the west and a part of the German Empire on the east, was not to be wholly independent but was placed under the protection of the League of Nations; Danzig was to be represented diplomatically by Poland. When Hitler annexed Danzig in 1939, the Free City ceased to exist and it became part of the Nazi region of Danzig-West Prussia. After the war, the Allies agreed that Danzig would become a part of Poland in order to provide Poland with a port. This 1945 settlement brought a major demographic change: whereas in 1920, and for the next twenty years, ninety-five percent of the population of Danzig were ethnic Germans, after the second World War ethnic Germans were forced to emigrate to Germany, and Danzig was repopulated by ethnic Poles from central and eastern Poland. Adolph's and Anna's surviving sisters and brothers—with the exception of the sister who stayed in Russia—seem to have been part of this migration.

The family stayed in Danzig for about a year, working and going to school. Uncle Al, who was thirteen when they came to Danzig, worked in a stove factory for four months; "a Krachencko was the owner and a Tachinski was his boss. He then went to school for four months, 1919–20."67

Adolph and Anna and their sons were not the only members of the family to have reached Danzig [Document: Adolph's siblings, 2 images]. Adolph's youngest brother, Gustav, lived at 145 Neuer] Weg in [Tiegenhof, about twenty miles east of Danzig proper.68 It was Gustav who had gone to Ufa in 1914–15 to take care of his parents, Ludwig Werner and Caroline Klink Werner. After Gustav left Ufa, he married Tina, a Lithuanian, in 1915. The date of this marriage makes it seem plausible that Gustav was married in Tutschky.69 Gustav and his family seem to have settled in Tiegenhof, at least for a while. His eldest son, Max, was a musician and became Kapellmeister, "probably in Tiegenhof." In about 1923, however, Gustav "went to London. [Uncle] Al and Ernie [Pop]," his nephews in America, "sent him a package containing shoes in the twenties, and then they lost all track of him."70 But in 1949, Pop recorded that Gustav was living in Germany. Whether Gustav moved from Danzig shortly after it had become the "Free City" in order to keep his German citizenship, or whether he was forcibly resettled in Germany after 1945 with the rest of the German diaspora from Danzig, is not clear.71

Of Ludwig Werner's other sons and daughters, Fritz (Friedrich) also was settled in Germany in 1949. Amalia, married to a Russian by the name of Alexander, was still living in Russia. Karl and Heinrich were dead, and Gotfried had died in a "German" (that is, Danzig?) hospital of appendicitis at the age of 32. The Goertzes also were dispersed: Augusta (Karl's widow) and Louise, Anna's sisters, were living in Germany in 1949; the eldest sibling, Anna's brother Jacob, had died in Russia [Document: The Goertzes in 1949, 2 images]. In the hindsight of history, Adolph and Anna Werner and their sons were the most fortunate among the family: they came to the United States and became American citizens. Their enforced wanderings were over.

When the time was settled for them to leave Danzig, "newspaper ads stated the fare as $130 ocean passage but each person had to have $30 in hand."72 The handwritten scrawl on the ship's manifest reporting how much money Adolf had with him is difficult to read; originally a different figure seems to have been typed, but it was then written over with what looks like "30," and the other members of the family had no money at all when they arrived. Ernie remembers that the family brought with them a trunk containing a "beaded door" and some other items, including baptismal certificates and school records [Document: Pop's baptismal certificate]. The family memory and the ship's manifest tell conflicting stories about how they paid for their passage. These stories are all worth telling.

How They Came Over: The S.S. Susquehanna Manifest

The manifest is one of the most emotionally compelling documents I have ever seen relating to the Werners. When I decided, on a whim one afternoon in 2006, to look at the Ellis Island website and scan for "Ernst Werner," I was not even confident that I would find Pop. Yet on the very first page of the search results I found an Ernst Werner who had sailed from Danzig in 1920 at the age of twelve on the S.S. Susquehanna and had arrived in New York on September 11. Hardly daring to believe that this could be my grandfather, I followed the link to look at a photographed image of the ship's manifest. And there in front of me was the family: Adolph ("Adolf"), age 44, occupation joiner, literate in German (as were all the others in his family), 5 feet 11 inches tall, with a light complexion, black hair, and brown eyes; Anna, age 36, a mere 5 feet tall, light complexion, black hair, brown eyes; Wilhelm, age 16, occupation workman, 5 feet 10 inches tall, light complexion, black hair, brown eyes; Adalbert, 14 years old, 4 feet 5 inches tall, light complexion, fair hair, brown eyes; Ernst, 12 years and 3 months old, 3 feet 6 inches tall, light complexion, fair hair, brown eyes; and Franz, 8 years old, 3 feet tall, light complexion, black hair, and brown eyes. I felt as if I had gone back in time and was watching the Werner family standing at Ellis Island in front of me that day in mid-September, looking out at me with serious faces. I couldn't believe how small Ernst and Franz were.

Passengers sailing from Danzig on the S.S. Susquehanna [U.S.S. Susquehanna at sea] in August 1920 perhaps first expected to embark on the twenty-sixth, but on the manifest "30" was typed over "26," so it is possible that the embarkation was delayed by four days. Many years later the National Park Service interviewed passengers who had taken that voyage. Mojsze Myldiner (in America, Morris Mildener), a Yiddish-speaking Polish Jew who was seven at the time according to the manifest, recalled that it was a stormy two weeks ("three and a half weeks ... which shouldn't have taken more than five, six days, seven days the most") before the Susquehanna arrived in New York on September 11, 1920. The ship, he said, was crowded and many people were miserably seasick, but for steerage passengers there was only one bathroom and no place to wash up.73 He and his sister spent most of their time on deck away from the smells and the filth. Perhaps the departure from Danzig had been delayed by the bad weather at sea [Storm at sea on U.S.S. Susquehanna]. The ship was a battered old vessel, built in 1899, that had once been the German passenger ship Rhein but had been confiscated by the United States at Baltimore in 1917 during the first World War and recommissioned as the U.S.S. Susquehanna. It carried thousands of troops to Europe in 1917 and 1918 and home again after the war [Wounded soldiers on U.S.S. Susquehanna]; then it was chartered to the United States Mail Steamship Company. When the ship arrived in New York in September 1920 it was completing only its second round trip as an American vessel in passenger service. "When we finally got to New York, as we passed the Statue of Liberty I remember everybody crying, and happiness," recalled Mojsze Myldiner. He remembered that it was Yom Kippur, because his strict Orthodox Jewish father, who was to meet them in New York after years of separation, refused to travel on that holiest of holy days and the family had to stay almost by themselves overnight at Ellis Island. The Susquehanna was not in service for many years after 1920, but was laid up in August 1922 and sold and scrapped in Japan in 1928. Most photographs of the Susquehanna show the vessel in Navy service [View from mast on U.S.S. Susquehanna; View from bridge on U.S.S. Susquehanna].74

The manifest for the S.S. Susquehanna arriving in New York on that day in September is like Hesiod's Muses: it tells many stories, and some of them may be true.75 In viewing the images of the manifest, keep in mind that the document was spread over two wide pages [Document: Susquehanna manifest September 11, 1920, 2 images]. The names of the family appear on the first page, with the information concerning the Werners on lines 25–30; then comes the second page, which identifies individuals by line number without repeating the names. One of the most striking assertions made on the manifest was the height of the two youngest sons. Ernst at twelve was said only to be three feet six inches; this is only as tall as my petite Chinese-born daughter was at age five and a half. Franz, at eight, was three feet tall; this was Benita's height at age three. The family had indeed gone through hard times, and perhaps their growth was stunted, but it is hard to believe they were this small. Perhaps the recorded height was the result of careless guesswork on the part of the examiners, who performed the medical examinations very quickly and had their eyes out for more serious matters of health. Many immigrants who came through Ellis Island experienced anxiety about the required physical examination, because if they were found to be severely handicapped, or ill with any one of a number of specified ailments, they would be denied entry to the United States and would have to be sent back to their country of origin. Mojsze Myldiner recalled the family's worry when his older sister was pulled aside until an ophthalmologist could inspect her eyes, but then she was allowed to pass through.

Another story the manifest tells concerns the Werner family's origins and national identity. We know that, although they had lived in Ukraine and then Siberia for most of their lives, they were not Russian citizens. On the manifest Adolph seems to have wanted to distance himself from his Russian origins. He truthfully claimed Danzig as their "Nationality (Country of which citizen or subject)"—in three months, Danzig would become an independent state—and he was identified as German under "Race or people." In answer to the question, "Place of birth. Country. City or town," however, Adolph stated that he and all his sons were born in "Tawin, Germany," while Anna was said to have been born in "Samara, Germany." Places with these names both exist, but they are not in Germany. Towin, also once known as Jungplauen, was a town in Volhynia Province, northern Ukraine, about sixty miles northwest of Jitomir and twenty miles due north of Novgrad Volynsk (as these towns are spelled on the map [Map: Volhynia Province]); Towin itself is not marked on the map, but would have been about where the I in Volhynia is printed. To see Volhynia in its larger geographical context, see the map cited previously [Map: Ukraine], where Volhynia is outlined in orange in the upper left.

The history of German settlement in Volhynia is its own unique story. German migration into Volhynia "occurred under significantly different conditions" than those affecting Germans who had immigrated earlier into other parts of Russia. "Their migration began at the encouragement of local noblemen, often Polish landlords, who wanted to develop their significant land-holdings in the area. ... The Germans of Volhynia received none of the special tax and military service freedoms granted to the Germans in other areas. ... The settlement started as a trickle shortly after 1800. A surge occurred after the first Polish rebellion of 1831. ... The largest migration came after the second Polish rebellion of 1863 when they began to flood into the area by the thousands until they reached their peak at about 200,000 in the year 1900. ... Though the population peaked in 1900, many Germans had already begun leaving Volhynia in the late 1880s for North and South America." The "vast majority" of Volhynia Germans were Lutheran, but there were also Mennonites from the Vistula River region as well as Baptists and Moravian Brethren.76 The history of Volhynia settlement is complex, however, and in evaluating the movements of its populations we need to keep in mind that there is a distinction between the earlier German-speaking immigrants, who came in order to farm lands owned by Polish landowners, and later immigrants, who came to Volhynia after restrictions were established against Polish landholding. These later immigrants came in the hope of acquiring land of their own. "The cornerstone of land policy in the aftermath of the 1863 Polish rebellion was the ordinance of December 10, 1865, which prohibited individuals of 'Polish origins' from acquiring land outside cities by any means other than inheritance. Decades of administrative decisions gradually refined exactly what was meant by 'Polish origins.' The definition came to rest neither upon Catholicism, nor upon place of birth, but rather, upon a subjective determination of whether the individual in question was culturally Polish. ... Ironically, the Russian Ruling Senate issued a legal decision that the great reforms of the 1860s protected foreign subjects from the restrictive laws! Thus, one of the unintended consequences of the combination of the great reforms and the campaign against Polish landholding was an influx of foreign immigrants into the western provinces, above all into Volynia. Their number grew rapidly, from 90,000 ... in the early 1880s to over 200,000 by 1890. They came predominantly from Germany, but also from Austria-Hungary, and from Russian Poland. In 1890 the foreign-subject population was roughly 72 percent German, 13 percent Czech, 9 percent Polish, and 5 percent Ukrainian."77 This unintended influx of foreigners into these areas of Ukraine created a counterreaction. "Then an edict of March 14, 1887, banned foreign subjects from buying, leasing, or acquiring landed property in Kiev, Podolia, and Volynia in any other way except through inheritance. ... The law effectively slowed immigration of foreign subjects to the indicated provinces. It also caused an increase in naturalization rates as immigrants rushed to naturalize to avoid the restrictions (by 1895, 166,000 of 199,000 'colonists' in Volynia were Russian subjects)."78

Why Adolph decided to claim a town in Volhynia Province as his and his sons' birthplace is anyone's guess; it is probable that no one in the family had ever been there. As for Samara, Anna's alleged birthplace according to the ship's manifest, the map of Russia shows that it is situated on the Volga River, far to the east of Ukraine but not as distant as Orenburg, the Siberian town where Anna's parents had first settled after their marriage. It is not inconceivable that Anna was born in Samara. Her family may have lived in or passed through the place when they were moving from Orenburg to Ukraine. But the birth places claimed on the manifest seem unlikely, since no other evidence connects the Werners or Goertzes with either the Volhynia Germans or with the Volga Germans, both of which groups had immigrated to Russia under circumstances different from those faced by the Werners and Goertzes; moreover, the family's memory that Adolph was born in Waldorf and his sons in Orekhov and Tokmak, all places in Ukraine, conflicts with those claims. We can only speculate about what motives the family may have had for hiding the truth about the nations and towns of their birth—perhaps, like Odysseus, they had learned that it is dangerous to reveal the whole truth about one's origins.

The Thiessens and the Mitulskis

Perhaps the most fascinating and mysterious half-fiction on the manifest concerns "Dietrich Thienen." One of the questions on this document is the immigrant's final destination—his or her "Intended future permanent residence." The Werner family stated that the town of Colony, Oklahoma, was their intended destination, and repeated this claim in answer to another question, "Whether going to visit a relative or friend; and if so, what relative or friend, and his name and complete address." There, the answer "Brother in law: Dietrich Thienen, Colony Oklahoma N. America" is given. The claim that "Dietrich Thienen" was Adolph's brother-in-law and Anna's brother is, to us, an obvious falsehood, since a brother of Anna Goertz would not have had the last name Thienen. Not only must this statement be false on that ground alone, but it utterly contradicts the firmly held family belief that the Werner family were able to come to America because they could work at Seabrook Farms to pay for their passage.

Yet "Dietrich Thienen" was not a creature of fiction, even though his name is wrong on this manifest, the shape of his story was distorted, and the truth is hard to tease out. Al preserved a priceless detail in his family notes: "A sister of Martin [Goertz, Anna Werner's father] married a German named Matulski who he met in Danzig. They had a son Anton (cousin of Anna). Went to Oklahoma for 2 years then returned to Germany. They went to U.S. with Dietrick Tiesan, maybe a relative." This statement raises questions for which I have not yet found an answer, and perhaps never will: What was the date of that first voyage to Oklahoma? Can any evidence can be found for it?

A crucial clue concerning the identities of "Anton Matulski" and "Dietrich Thienen" comes from an unexpected source. After the S.S. Susquehanna's departure from New York, where it had left the Werner family on American soil on September 11, 1920, the vessel made a brisk return voyage over the Atlantic and took on its next passengers in Bremen and Danzig on September 18. Returning to New York by an extended and indirect route—by way of Cape Town, South Africa, where it stopped to take on a few more passengers on October 22—it brought the family of Anton Mitulski to Ellis Island on November 3, 1920 (in the manifest image, note that the second page was originally photographed with a slip of paper placed over the critical information concerning the Mitulskis, but the page was photographed a second time and I have included a cropped image of it with the information visible [Document: Susquehanna manifest November 6, 1920, 3 images).

Anton Mitulski was 34 years old and a locksmith by trade. He came with his family: Anna, his wife, age 33; his daughters Olga, age 10, and Berta, age 3; and a son, Anton, age 8. The nationality of this family was recorded as German, and their last permanent residence was said to have been Danzig, but all claimed to have been born in "Chotzica, Russia"—perhaps Chortitza, in Ukraine, the first Mennonite settlement in Russia; this place had been settled in 1789 by colonists from Danzig.79 Oklahoma was the Mitulskis' intended final destination. On the manifest, the typewritten "Col." before "Oklahoma" was crossed out and "OKeene" handwritten over it. Although these coincidences—the family's birth in Russia, German nationality, and last residence in Danzig—may seem to construct a compelling argument in themselves to connect the Mitulskis with the Werners, one detail undeniably shows that the two families were related. The relative or friend the Mitulski family declared that they were going to join was Anton's "Uncle: Die[t]rich Thiessen," who lived in "Colonie Oklahoma." Unlike the Werners, who stated that they themselves had paid for their passage on the Susquehanna's previous voyage but did not yet have tickets to their relative's home in Oklahoma, the Mitulskis declared that they had tickets to Oklahoma and that Dietrich Thiessen had paid for their passage.

The Mitulskis did indeed go to Oklahoma. I do not know whether they settled first in O'Keene, the town in Blaine County to the west of Oklahoma City where they had declared they were going. Ten years later, in 1930, the census reveals that they were farming on rented land in Union Township, Washita County, further to the west, the same county in which the small town of Colony—Dietrich Thiessen's home, according to the manifests—is situated [Document: 1930 federal census for Anton Mitulski].

Life was not easy for the Mitulskis in the 1930s. The 1940 census shows that their fortunes had fallen. Anton and his wife Anna, now 53 and 52, were living in their son-in-law Ruben Mergen's house in the town of Clinton, Custer County. The census asks whether each person had worked during the week of March 22–30 and in what capacity, or whether the person was seeking work. Anton, a laborer for the WPA, did not have a job that week but was seeking work; Anna did not work. Their son, Anton, 28, a laborer at a dairy, and son-in-law Ruben, 36, who was normally employed as a nurse in a tuberculosis sanitarium, had also been seeking work that week. Their daughter Olga, 29, and son Otto, 18, both worked in the laundry of the sanitarium where Ruben was sometimes employed; while Agnes, 17, was a housekeeper in a private home. On this uncertain, and doubtless rather low, income the Mergens and Mitulskis had to support themselves and the Mergens' two young children. Despite their hardships in dustbowl Oklahoma, however, the older generation of immigrants never left the state; Anton and Anna are buried in Clinton.80

Why the Mitulskis did not come over on the same voyage as the Werners in 1920 can only be guessed. Perhaps there were no available berths left on that earlier voyage, or perhaps the families never intended to stay together. What does seem certain is that the Werners and Mitulskis had concocted their plans together in Danzig: each family would say they were going to live near a close relative, Dietrich Thiessen, in Colony, Oklahoma. They must have felt that this would be the best argument they could make for immigration.81 Perhaps they made separate voyages because they feared that their shared story might draw suspicion.

Can anything be discovered about that elusive Dietrich Thiessen?82 I have not yet found a ship's manifest documenting his immigration, his familial relationships with the Mitulski and Werner families remain obscure, and we may never know whether he sponsored the Mitulski family's journey to America. Yet a story emerges about his settling in America. The manifests and census records taken together indicate that Dietrich Thiessen existed, that he lived in Oklahoma, and that he was connected with the Mitulskis and Werners—if only in the stories the two families told. The 1900 federal census from Seay Township, Blaine County, Oklahoma (the county where the Mitulskis had claimed they were going to live when they came through Ellis Island), includes a household headed by Dietrich Thiessen, born August 1852, age 47, and married for 24 years. Dietrich himself was born in Russia, his mother in Germany, and his father in Russia. He immigrated in 1889. He owned his own farm without a mortgage. Although literate, and although he had lived in America for eleven years, neither he nor his wife, Susanna, age 44, could yet speak English. Susanna had borne twelve children, of whom four had died. Still living with the family were Dietrich D., age 22, b. October 1877 in Russia; Jacob D., age 16, b. November 1883 in Russia; Peter, age 9, b. June 1890 in Kansas; Bernhard, age 8, b. March 1892 in Kansas; Anna, age 4, b. March 1896 in Oklahoma; and John, age 1, b. December 1898 in Oklahoma. The ages of the surviving children make it probable that at least two, and perhaps all four, of the children who did not survive were born (and perhaps died) in Russia. By the time the federal census was taken ten years later, in 1910, the Thiessen parents had learned English. All the children were still living at home, including Jacob at age 26; in fact, Jacob himself, who did "odd jobs," was the census recorder, as is shown by his signature at the top of the page. Peter, at 19, was a student at State Normal (now Oklahoma State University, the oldest public institution of higher education in Oklahoma). Bernhard, age 18, worked at home on the farm and now went by the name of Burnett. It is interesting to see that, in recording the place of each person's birth, Jacob made a consistent distinction between "Ger. German" and "Russ. German," and that he chose to identify their ethnic and linguistic affiliation rather than their place of birth, despite the explicit wording of the census question. He described his father's parents both as "Ger. German," while he and his mother (as well as two other families of neighbors on the same page) were "Russ. German."

By 1920, a family tragedy resulted in the elder Thiessens' moving. They were now living with their daughter, Anna Hoch, in Seger, Washita County, Oklahoma. Anna, only 23, had recently been widowed; she had a daughter, age three and a half, and a son, seven months old. Her parents may have moved to help her keep up the farm and raise the children. The census shows that several of the grown children still lived next to each other in Seay Township, Blaine County, Oklahoma, where they were all wheat farmers. The younger D[ietrich] D. Thiessen was now 42, had gained American citizenship in 1895 (the elder Dietrich had become a citizen in 1892), and was married with two children; his farm was sufficiently prosperous that he was also an employer. J[acob] D. Thiessen, 36, was married and had three daughters; he too had gained citizenship in 1895, and he worked his own farm. B[urnett] N. Thiessen, 27, was single, living alone next to his brothers, and worked his own farm.

The "Germans from Russia" web page from the Oklahoma Historical Society's Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History & Culture states: "Volga Germans began leaving for the United States in the late 1870s, and Mennonites began moving in the 1880s, as did Black Sea and Volhynia Germans. The Great Plains of the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas, markedly similar to the Russian steppes, became populated by them, and many moved on into the plains of Oklahoma and Texas. ... Land was the factor that drew them southward into Oklahoma Territory. They were poor, and in Kansas they were forced to rent farm land. Beginning in 1889, when public lands were offered for homesteads in Oklahoma, they quickly took advantage of the opportunity to own farms." Eric Lohr, in his book Russian Citizenship, noted that "emigration agents from railroad companies and steamship lines began to appear in Odessa," on the Black Sea, during the period when land became scarcer. "They quickly found that Germans in Russia were far easier to recruit than Russians or Ukrainians, leading to a large German emigration from the region. Second, third, and fourth sons in the German communities without a land inheritance often chose to emigrate. The operation was so successful that for a decade or so in the 1880s and 1890s, the bulk of the population of the territory of South Dakota was comprised of Russian-Germans."83 It is one of the imbalances of history that the availability of land for German-Russians coming to America was only made possible by the forced emigration of the Native Americans, most of whom had already been displaced from their original homes. "When the Cheyenne and Arapaho reservation opened to non-Indian settlement in April 1892, Germans from Russia took up homes there. Earlier, in the 1880s Mennonites led by Heinrich Voth had established missions and schools at Darlington and Cantonment, in the Cheyenne and Arapaho reservation. When the reservation opened, Voth's assistant, John J. Kliewer, helped bring a colony of German-Russian Mennonites from Kansas to Korn (Corn), in Washita County, in 1892 and 1893. This was the largest colony of that ethnic/religious group in the territory. ... [O]ver the period of years from 1889 to 1910 eight major clusters of Germans from Russia emerged in western Oklahoma."84 Their emigration from Kansas into Oklahoma, and the fact that they chose to farm in the Midwest rather than take up a trade in the east, makes me wonder whether the Thiessens were Mennonites, rather than Lutherans like many of the Black Sea Germans.

The fact that the Mitulskis and the Werners both cited Colony, Oklahoma, as their intended destination may reflect another piece of Oklahoma history. The original settlement in this area was known as the Seger Colony. In 1886, John Seger had established this settlement for a group of Arapahos; they were later joined by Cheyennes. Seger founded an industrial school for the Native Americans in 1892, and in 1895 the Dutch Reformed Church founded a mission there. After the 1892 land run a townsite and post office were established. A bank, three churches, a newspaper, a hotel, and other businesses were established. In 1911, the population of Colony stood at about three hundred. Present-day Colony is less than one-tenth the size of Trumansburg, New York (in 2000, the population of Colony was only 147). But the settlement had had its moment of fame. The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History states: "Prior to the land run [of 1892] to open the Cheyenne and Arapaho lands to non-Indian settlement, many participants started their race at Colony. Seger was in charge of the more than two thousand prospective settlers whom the U.S. government allowed to begin inside the boundaries because of the dangers of crossing Cobb Creek en masse."85 Dietrich Thiessen may well have participated in the land run into Oklahoma shortly after his son Bernhard was born in Kansas in 1892, since his next child, Anna, was born in 1896 in Oklahoma. Although by 1920, when the Werners and Mitulskis came to America, the town's population had perhaps already begun to decline, it is possible that these families claimed Colony as the home of Dietrich Thiessen because they knew about the significant role played by the town in the history of the settlement of European settlers in Oklahoma—and perhaps in Dietrich's personal history—thirty years earlier.

Seabrook Farms

Curious about the family story that C. F. Seabrook had offered to pay the Werner family's passage in return for their promise to work on his southern New Jersey farm, and wondering how this story fit into the story offered by the S.S. Susquehanna manifest, I decided to find out more about Seabrook Farms. Doing so brought me into a world of colorful characters, beginning with the hard-nosed entrepreneur Charles F. Seabrook (the "Old Man" or C. F. [C. F. Seabrook]), continuing with his flamboyant, eccentric, and immensely wealthy son, John M. Seabrook (Jack [Jack Seabrook]), and culminating—at least for now—with Jack Seabrook's son, John Seabrook, a staff writer for the New Yorker. When I discovered that John had written a number of articles about his own family's history—among them "The Spinach King," 1995; "My Father's Closet," 1998; "The Tree of Me," 2001; and "Marriage of the Century," 200486—and that he was easy to contact, I sent him an email. I explained my family's connection with his family's history and asked him whether he might have any knowledge of his grandfather's possible recruitment of workers in Danzig in 1920 or other information about Seabrook Farms in the 1920s. John wrote back and said that the best person to ask would be his father, Jack, since Jack had grown up on the farm, had managed it later, and knew more about its history than anyone else. He promised to talk to his father. A few days later John wrote to me again and encouraged me to telephone Jack, then (in 2006) an elderly widower who lived in Aiken, South Carolina, and who, John said, did not have much to do and would be interested in talking with me. He gave me his father's telephone number.

John himself has touched in his writings on the history of foreign workers at Seabrook Farms. "Many of the workers at Seabrook Farms were refugees of twentieth-century upheavals and hardships: Italians avoiding their war with Turkey in the nineteen-tens; former soldiers of the White Russian Army in the late teens and early twenties; Americans who lost their jobs during the Depression; Jamaicans and Barbadians and German prisoners of war in the forties; Poles, Hungarians, and Czechs fleeing the advance of the Soviet Army in 1945; Japanese Americans from '44 to '47; and Estonians and Latvians running from Stalin's rule in the late forties and early fifties. My grandfather built 'ethnic villages' for the different groups, and this collection of villages became Seabrook. In the nineteen-forties and fifties, there were thirty different languages spoken in Seabrook, a town of about five thousand people." Of the early history of his grandfather's development of the farm in a new kind of agricultural venture, John wrote: "Over an eight-year period, he put in thirty-five miles of roads, two railroads, a power plant, six enormous greenhouses, an ice plant, a sawmill (to make boxes for the truck), a canning plant, a cold-storage facility, and a school, and he laid out villages for his employees and their families: the 'Italian village' for his Italian workers, and so on. In 1924, he went bust and lost the business, but he had got it back by 1930, and soon began freezing vegetables for General Foods, which had acquired the patents for Clarence Birdseye's quick-freezing process."

It took me a few days to summon the courage to call Jack. I had read John's story of how his parents met in "Marriage of the Century." In April, 1956, John's mother,  Elizabeth Toomey (Liz), was a 32-year-old United Press reporter whose column, "Woman's View," ran in dozens of papers around the country. In a telephone interview with Grace Kelly, she had scooped the story that Grace was planning to marry Prince Rainier of Monaco, and as a member of the press she booked a cabin on the S.S. Constitution, the ocean liner that took Grace Kelly, her family, and sixty friends to Monaco to her wedding. It was during this voyage that Liz met Jack, a 39-year-old bachelor, who was said to be "something of a playboy. He had a thing with Eva Gabor, and Ann Miller after that. Regular at '21' and the Stork Club. Good-looking, always wears beautiful clothes, and seems like he must have money."87 Jack knew Grace Kelly through her father, whose construction firm had built the main factory for Seabrook Farms. Jack, "who'd taken over a number of business responsibilities from his father, who was in poor health ... made a point of getting his name in the society columns as often as possible because he thought the women who read them would be more inclined to buy his frozen peas and spinach than the products of his competitors."88 On the day Jack met Liz, her initial impression was not entirely positive. "He was tall and slick-looking and dressed in a loud, checked sports jacket and was obviously full of himself."89 Jack was obsessed with clothing; years later his son wrote about his "drape suits, lounge suits, and sack suits, in worsted, serge, and gabardine; white linen suits for Palm Beach and Jamaica before the invention of air-conditioning; Glen plaids and knee-length loden coats for brisk Princeton-Harvard football games and a raccoon coat for Princeton-Dartmouth, which was later in the season."90 On this particular voyage of the S.S. Constitution Jack "had appointed himself the unofficial sommelier for the crossing and put the word out among the guests that if they wanted to drink good champagne, he was the man to see."91 Jack was drawn to Liz at first sight, and the two were married in October.

I found Jack to be an engaging conversationalist who still liked to hear the sound of a woman's voice. He found the Werner family's story intriguing but was not able to confirm that his father had recruited German-speaking workers in Danzig in 1920. Some Germans, he said, had jumped ship in Delaware Bay before World War I and come to Seabrook Farms, and others continued to come after World War I. Jack's main association with Danzig was that he himself used to go to Poland after the Second World War to buy expensive horses for the coach-in-four that he liked to drive. Hitler, he said, had built a road twenty-four feet wide, to accommodate tanks, on this Danzig corridor, which Jack called "Hitler's highway." The bridges on this highway were destroyed by Allied bombing.

Not having learned much about his father's recruiting tactics that shed light on German workers, I asked Jack about Seabrook workers from Russia. Did they stand out in any way in his memory? Jack mused about the "Polack Village" at Seabrook Farms, telling me that it had been built for soldiers in the White Russian army who had escaped across Siberia through Vladivostok, coming to America through San Francisco. These Russians, all men, were not known by their real names; the paymaster wrote down nicknames like "Big Pete." Jack told me that raw alcohol was issued to them in the fields.

One of the subjects about which I wanted to know more was Adolph's carpentry at Seabrook Farms. Not only was carpentry, to me, an essential part of Adolph's identity, but it was through his carpentry work at Seabrook Farms that he had gotten the splinter that infected him with blood poisoning and led to his death in 1924. Jack remembered the various shops at the farm for carpenters, plumbers, and others; the carpenters' shop was larger than the others, but Jack had not worked in it as a child and was less familiar with it. He confirmed that buildings were put up to house the workers, and particularly recalled the barracks built for the black workers who brought in the summer harvest. They were very long, like horse stables. In that early period, the sawmill also turned out both rough boards and thinner slabs for constructing boxes to ship the vegetables; when corrugated paper was invented, that manufacture stopped. Jack did not think to mention several small houses on Love Lane. These were Adolph's work, Al told me recently. "It was just a couple of years before my dad died [in 1995] and we were visiting out in Bridgeton. One afternoon we took a ride out to Seabrook Farms area, specifically Love Lane. He always talked about this, saying this is where they lived in a small house just after they got there, and the boss lived up the road in a larger house. Well, there were four, maybe five, small houses along the road and a larger on up the road. He said his dad had built these houses. Can you believe that this was the first time in over 60 years that he had shown these to me; I had no idea where they were and probably couldn't get you there today. This was in connection with living at Big Oak, and there was a large oak tree along the road."92

Jack and I kept circling back in our conversation to talk about the various ethnic groups who had come to Seabrook Farms over the years. More recently, the people who have received the most attention for their sojourn at Seabrook Farms are the Japanese. "In 1943, I was discussing with a Philadelphia Quaker organization the need to improve our relations with the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P.) so as to improve the recruitment of black Americans. The Quakers suggested we try to get Americans of Japanese ancestry out of the internment camps." The Japanese began arriving in 1944, and "[e]ventually, 2,500 came. ... Building was restricted in wartime, but we had permission to build a village for the Japanese Americans."93 Jack's history of Seabrook Farms was written to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of community service performed by the Seabrook chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League during and after World War II.

"After the war ended, [C. F.] went to Europe, his first trip there in years, to help relocate refugees such as the Estonians from Germany to Seabrook Farms."94 These immigrants, Jack told me, were sponsored by church groups.

Jack and I returned to the question of whether Old Man Seabrook might have paid for the Werners' passage in Danzig in return for their commitment to work on his farm. "C. F. Seabrook paid their passage and they had to work there until it was repaid," wrote Al. "Seabrook's financier in New York, name of White, was helping to expand the business. Italians, [who also worked at Seabrook Farms], were great on piece work but not on hours so C. F. decided to recruit in Germany." Although Jack did not know anything about whether his father had traveled to Danzig at that time, he confirmed that in the early period, both before and after World War I, C. F. did most of the recruiting. An advertisement published by C. F. in a local New Jersey newspaper in the mid-twenties conveys a vivid impression of his style.

Wanted!

Some people who are mad enough to desire a quiet, comfortable home with modern conveniences, in the country, and a chance to save money, rather than high wages with dirt, noise and uncertain employment. The place has nothing to recommend it except good treatment, healthful living, steady position, and an opportunity for everybody to work their way up in a new and growing business.

No sulkers or people with touchy feelings need apply. Anyone who says that he can get a job from 'So and So' any time he wants had better take it. It is better than this one. Our regular work day is a ten-hour day. However, the work consists in doing whatever the employer feels like asking at any minute of the day or night.95

At the end of our conversation, Jack encouraged me to visit the Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center and promised that he would have his secretary mail me a copy of a booklet about the history of Seabrook Farms that he had written for the center.96 The booklet arrived a few days later in the mail. I learned from it that C. F. actually lost the farm for a few years because of White's involvement, although he bought it back in October 1929. "Over-built, with high fixed costs, Seabrook Farms was losing money. In the autumn of 1924, the White family, the outside shareholders who had so enthusiastically supplied the capital for expansion, sacked C. F. as general manager and put the company into receivership." But "despite the 1924 receivership and the loss of his investment, C. F. never missed a beat."97 He became involved in construction jobs both in the United States and Europe in the 1920s. "In the middle 1920's, C. F. went to Europe to do construction jobs, eventually working in nine countries as far afield as Turkey. ... The 1920's were without doubt the best decade of C. F.'s life. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do. He often made as many as four round trips a year across the Atlantic, and that meant spending forty days a year on the big luxury ships. He learned about fine food, wine, and clothes. I can remember my mother asking in that period why he needed so many sets of evening clothes? He explained he needed both white tie and black tie on the ship and that it was customary for a regular traveler to leave his shipboard clothes in the care of the ship's valet so they would be ready and laid out in the cabin when he came aboard for the next trip. He needed another complete set of clothes to leave at the Savoy, where he lived in London, and still another at his club in New York. This may sound slightly familiar to my wife and children from the period half a century later when I was traveling the world on international business."98 Whether C. F. was already traveling extensively in 1920, at the beginning of this period, and whether his interests were focused on the farm rather than on his construction ventures during these travels, is an open question. It is certainly true, however, that the Old Man did most of his own recruiting. And, although under the terms of the Alien Contract Labor Law of 1885 it would have been illegal for him to sponsor a family's immigration in return for their labor, it is also the case that he was not afraid of the law—during Prohibition he made applejack from the apples in his orchards and had bootleggers run the liquor through the marsh creeks to Delaware Bay—and he was always secretive about his methods. In his essay, "The Spinach King" (an epithet that was used, not of the Old Man himself, but of Jack when he was running the Seabrook Farms company in the 1950s), his grandson John wrote, "One quality of C. F.'s that comes through clearly in people's memories of him is that he didn't like to tell you what he was thinking. He hated it when you wrote down anything he said. Sometimes my father [Jack] would try to take notes at business meetings, and C. F. would rail about it: 'What're you doing? Stop doing that!'" It is not impossible, then, that he or an agent illegally recruited workers in Danzig but told them not to reveal their connection with him.99 Since the Old Man hated to keep records, we will probably never know.

While Adolph's work at Seabrook Farms involved carpentry, his sons went to work in the fruit orchards. In our conversation, Jack had been interested to hear about this orchard work, since the orchards harkened back to an earlier period in the farm's history. "In the 1920s, the vast acreage of fruit trees C. F. had planted during the period of wartime high costs began to bear fruit, but prices were poor and demand low. The high fixed cost of establishing the orchards never was recovered and the trees were finally torn out during World War II and the land planted in vegetables."100 Pop, at 12, carried water to the workers in the orchards. He did not yet go to school because he was still learning English.

Money must have been tight those first few years, but after all the miles they had traveled by sleigh, railroad, foot, wagon, and ship, the family eagerly embraced one of the most enduring symbols of twentieth-century American life: the automobile. Al wrote, "In 1923 Adolph bought a new Ford Touring Car, the last one the dealer, Wescott, had for the year, for $415.00. ... Wescott sold the car at the bargain price because it was the last one he had for the year and he] decided to get rid of it. Two years later he went broke because he sold all his new cars and couldn't get rid of the used cars, or so the story is told." When Adolph died in 1924, Uncle Al became the owner of the Ford [[1923 Ford Touring Car; Bridgeton Race Way with car]. "He then asked directions to get a license and passed the tests before he could speak much English. It was the second license at Seabrook Farms. His boss in the apple orchards, Albert Hess, had failed the exam twice before and was mad about it but later got his license too." Adolph and Uncle Al may have begun the family love affair with cars, but Pop continued it in style. In later, more prosperous years he took photographs of his cars from every angle, and he was very proud of his white Mustang convertible, which he would trade in for a new model when he had the inclination.

Epic tradition has it that the great warrior Achilles died from a wound inflicted in the only vulnerable place on his body—his heel. Adolph, after having steered his family steadily along their unimaginably difficult journey, was felled by a splinter that became lodged in his hand during the course of his carpentry work at Seabrook Farms. Although the splinter was removed, the wound became infected, and Adolph died of "blood poisoning" on May 14, 1924. His death must have been a severe emotional blow to the family, and it set them back a few steps on their path toward economic progress.

Education in Russia, Danzig, and America

Pop, at 16 (his age in the linked photo, taken at the time of his confirmation [Pop as a youth]), had been taken out of school in 1923 and made to go to work again at Seabrook Farms after his father had died. This is what Ernie remembers about his education in America, but in the same conversation he described this as "elementary" school, because he has always said that Pop had been educated only through the third-grade level. On the 1940 census Pop himself reported that he had been educated through the eighth grade. It is hard to work out these details with any consistency; it seems most likely that his level of schooling could be described variously, depending on how the years are reckoned. It is certainly the case that although Pop started his life in the United States working at Seabrook Farms, he and his younger brother Francis later did attend school in New Jersey; the census shows that in 1930 Uncle Francis, age 17, was a student; in 1940 the census reports that Francis had been educated through four years of high school. Pop may have been at a third-grade or an eighth-grade level in 1924, or somewhere in between, when he left school. Uncle Bill and Uncle Al had gone to work in the United States, but perhaps never attended school in this country. The 1940 census reports that Uncle Bill, the eldest son, had completed the ninth grade; his World War II enlistment record states that he had completed three years of high school. Uncle Al was thirteen or fourteen when he last went to school for several months in Danzig. His son Al wrote of Uncle Al: "Education consisted of 4–5 months in Germany [which would mean Danzig], 2 months in Siberia, and 2 months in the Ukraine." His nephew Ernie wrote, "Albert was a boy who (Pop once told me) ran away from school in first grade & was never made to go back. A middle-aged man when I knew him (father of three boys about my same age) he had some difficulty reading through newspaper articles but he would work his way through them, reading aloud."101 Uncle Al would have been about ten years old when the family left Ukraine for Siberia in 1915, so if he had had only two months of education in Ukraine, as his son wrote, then he may indeed have run away from school in the first grade. Yet two attempts were later made, in Siberia and Danzig, to allow him some further schooling. As for Adolph and Anna, the only information I have discovered is that on the 1940 census Anna claimed to have been educated through the fourth grade.

Except for the few months' schooling the boys had in Danzig, the family's primary schooling would have been in Russian. Although the earlier German colonists had been allowed to open German-language schools, Russian nationalist sentiment grew under the conservative czar Alexander III. From 1891 onwards, schooling was required to be in Russian.102

The whole family was self-educated to a large degree. Through running the bakery, they obviously learned how to conduct a successful business. Moreover, Pop's letters are written in a confident, consistent hand and show a command of English vocabulary and idiom that is impressive for a man whose first two languages were German and Russian and whose schooling was so irregular. While his spelling is often phonetic, his thinking is clear and he expresses himself directly and concisely.

The Century Baking Company

Pop left Seabrook Farms for good at age 18; he had worked there for five years. He first got a job at a glass factory but hated it so thoroughly that he left after one week. Again, the rest of this story is best told in his own words [Letter: Century Baking Company, 6 images].

12–14–'73

Dear Helen,

I have read your letter several times, it's very interesting and I'm glad you like College and are happy.

I have been thinking about your request for me to write on paper about my life, I find it increasingly tempting to do just that, It will take me some time but I'll try.

Sorry I didn't answer your letter sooner, I'm such a lousy corespondent. I make excuses for myself that I don't have time today but I'm not that busy, just lazy.

I've made a lot of mistakes in my time and the most blatant one was to retire when I did.

The only mittigating circumstance or rather excuse I give myself is that for ten years I worked for and in another Bakery I had made so little proggress that I was virtualy standing still and I was frustrated the same as I was the five years I worked for Seabrook farms previously. So I organised my three brothers and me into a solid desire to own a bakery. As chance would have it an opportunity came up and we jumped at it.

A bakery went under by missmanagement and the owner let us have a try at it.

This is not my life history I'm only writing a letter.

Well anyway it lasted 3 1/2 years, when the owner got too greedy and wanted to incorporate with him holding 75% of the shares. That would give him 75% of the profits. We were too successful and he wanted in and wouldn't sell us the building or equipment, so we incorporated and all four quit.

Then we bought a house and building where the Century Baking Co. was born. That was in 1938.

We did a tremendous job there for 3 1/2 years then my oldest brother was drafed into the army and the younger had to work in a Defence factory, that left two of us. We still had some debts to pay off so I took charge with only $2.70 in the bank but a whole weeks of supp[l]ies of stock.

Well, Al and I worked ourselves out of that hole and went on to a fair retail bakery. We quit all wholesale that made us more money with less rationed material, everything was rationed then. Bussnes was good and growing. Then in 1951 Al wanted to sell his share to me and I went ahead and bought it.

Now I was the sole owner[e] of the Century Baking Co. In the meantime in 1944 Bill came back From the army and Francis came back from the defence plant, but they wanted to sell their shares to me and Al and go into the grocery bussnes. So we did that and they went into the grocery bussnes.

Well I worked at the Century for 24 years and all the time I felt like a prisoner in my own shop.

I would look out the windows and doors and see school kids grow up into men and women and get married and have kids and I was still walled in.

So when the chance to sellout came I jumped at it not realizing that I was in a happy prison.

I found the outside world had changed so much I hardly knew how to cope with it. I was too old for this and too young for that.

So I just let myself drift along [and] not accomplishing anything.

There were some projects I wanted to undertake but it just didn't work out so now I'm retired for good.

Maybe you should keep this letter it will probably be the tail end of my life story.

I plan to write it if the project is possible for me to fullfil.

Have a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

Love

Pop Pop.

After his brief and unhappy foray into the glass factory, Pop got a job at LeSturgeon's Bakery, where he earned twenty-five dollars a week. "For ten years I worked for and in this] Bakery I had made so little proggress that I was virtualy standing still and I was frustrated the same as I was the five years I worked for Seabrook farms previously." A look at the 1930 census shows how the family were faring about five years after Pop started work at LeSturgeon's and ten years after their arrival in the United States [[Document: 1930 federal census for Anna Werner]. The widowed Anna, age 46, and two of her sons, Pop and Uncle Francis, were living in Anna's home, valued at $3,800, at 130 Vine Street, Bridgeton. Pop was 22 and worked for wages as a baker in the general baking industry, while Francis, age 17, went to school. The census recorder listed all three as naturalized. Uncle Bill, age 26, was a soldier in the Army and was based in New York; he had his first papers but was listed as not yet naturalized [Document: 1930 federal census for William Werner]. Uncle Al, age 24, was newly married to Lillian, 19 (Lil), and the couple were living with her mother, Josephine Komer ("Comer"), at Carmel Road, Millville, Cumberland County, New Jersey, in a house valued at $2,600.103 The census worker recorded that Uncle Al had been born in Russia but wrote "unknown" for "Language spoken in home before coming to the United States." Al's citizenship status was recorded as alien. He was employed as a baker in a bake shop, while Lil worked in the sewing room of a cotton mill [Document: 1930 federal census for Albert Werner].

Some of the details in these records are wrong or incomplete. This inaccuracy may have derived from the census taker's own impressions: perhaps he or she either failed to ask a question or was careless in recording the answer. There is no reason why Uncle Al's first language, German, could not have been known simply by asking him. The accuracy about the citizenship claims also comes under suspicion, since in one case the record is wrong: Uncle Al had petitioned for American citizenship on November 13, 1928.104

Despite Pop's frustration with his inability to get ahead, his experience at LeSturgeon's was the foundation for his career. One day—probably around 1935, when Pop was 28—he came home and announced to his brothers that he had taught himself everything they needed to know about baking and that it was time to take matters into their own hands. "So I organized my three brothers and me into a solid desire to own a bakery. As chance would have it an opportunity came up and we jumped at it. A bakery went under by mismanagement and the owner let us have a try at it."

This first bakery was on Vine Street, and Al's family "lived in the house in front of that. It was next to Vine Street School," an elementary school, "where I went for the first couple of years and we moved across the street from the school after that and [I] was there until either my seventh or ninth grade."105 The Vine Street bakery prospered under the brothers' management. Pop hired workers and had a delivery truck. They became so successful that the owner decided to make a change. "The owner got too greedy and wanted to incorporate with him holding 75% of the shares. That would give him 75% of the profits. We were too successful and he wanted in and wouldn't sell us the building or equipment, so we incorporated and all four quit.

"Then we bought a house and building where the Century Baking Co. was born. That was in 1938." They developed the bakery on the corner of Bank and Cedar Streets in what was formerly a small grocery. "They named it that because the new revolving shelf oven they bought for it was made by Century,"106 Al remembered. "It took a little while to get the bakery under good organization. The pies and cakes and buns were so good and the demand was there so bread baking was discontinued. Your grandfather [Pop] did most, but not all, of the cooking, mixing dough, decorating, and did the ordering of supplies and bookkeeping. My dad [Uncle Al] did the baking and the majority of the bench work. It worked out great and they made some really good products."107

The 1940 census shows how closely the family worked with each other. Pop, age 32, now owned his bakery. He lived with his wife, Bertha, 27 (whom he always called Sally because he did not like the name Bertha), his son Ernest, 8 (whom he and everyone else called Whitey because he was a towhead as a boy), and his daughter Shirley, 7 (who went by her very own name), at 52 York Street in their own house, whose value he stated as $3,000.108 Anna, 57, lived at 59 Bank Street with her unmarried son Bill, now 35. She, too, owned her home, valued at $2,000. Uncle Francis, 27, and his wife, Pauline, 23, lived next door to his mother at 61 Bank Street and paid $16 per month in rent. They had a baby daughter, Roberta.109 Although the house on Bank Street where Anna was living in 1940 was worth only somewhat more than half of what her Vine Street house had been worth ten years earlier, this change should not be taken at face value as a change for the worse. The whole family were working together. It is plausible to imagine that money realized from the sale of the Vine Street house may have contributed to the purchase of the house and building on Bank Street and perhaps also the house on York Street, as well as to the start of the business. Another indication of the family's common effort was the answer each one gave to the question about how many hours he or she had worked in the previous week and how much income he or she received from that work in the previous year. In 1930, Anna had answered "none" when asked whether she had an occupation or industry. In 1940, on the other hand, she answered "yes," and she, Uncle Bill, and Uncle Francis each claimed to be "proprietor" of a "wholesale and retail bakery." In the previous week, Anna had worked 50 hours, and Bill and Francis had each worked 72 hours. Pop calculated that he had worked 60 hours. For the "amount of money wages or salary received (including commissions)," Anna, Uncle Bill, and Uncle Francis each declared zero. Evidently they regarded their joint income as a resource held in common rather than as a wage. Pop, on the other hand, perhaps interpreting the question differently, declared that he had earned $1,300, which amounts to only twenty-five dollars a week. This was no more than he had made at LeSturgeon's, if Ernie's memory and the census declaration are both correct—but now the profits from the bakery were coming back to the family.110

The Werner women's role in the bakery is not always mentioned, but the 1940 census shows that Anna was committed not only to working many hours there but was involved in the financial side as well as one of the proprietors. Another woman who made a personal sacrifice was Aunt Lil, Uncle Al's wife. Early in the war years, apparently around 1941, she "had an abortion performed by Dr. Ware. Her brothers-in-law did not like the idea of a new child because she needed to work in the bakery and no one wanted to think this was a way [for Uncle Al] to evade the draft."111

For three and a half years after Century Baking Company opened, until 1942, "we did a tremendous job," wrote Pop. At about this time Pop's family moved to Bank Street. "Then my oldest brother was draf[t]ed into the army and the younges[t] had to work in a Defence factory, that left two of us. We still had some debts to pay off so I took charge with only $2.70 in the bank but a whole weeks of supp[l]ies of stock." In fact, Uncle Bill—who, as the 1930 census shows, was already an army veteran—was not drafted but enlisted on June 16, 1942, at Fort Dix, New Jersey, as a private, for the duration of the war. The enlistment record reports his profession as "retail manager" and states that he had completed three years of high school, that he was single with dependents, and that he was six feet tall and weighed 168 pounds.112 "Uncle Bill was the family sage. He never married & for the most part lived with his mother. Only Bill (Wilhelm Siegfried!) served in the army during WWII. As a result of his answers to tests which the new recruits took, he wasn't sent abroad to fight. Instead, he was one of those set apart to be trained as a teacher to other troops. But the war ended before very long & he was allowed to return to civilian life."113 When Uncle Bill and Uncle Francis returned from their wartime jobs, they decided to sell their shares of the bakery to Pop and Uncle Al in order to start a food store with a soda fountain a few blocks away. This unfortunately went bankrupt when a big food chain moved nearby.

Pop's own account of his career reveals his occasional frustration. "Well I worked at the Century for 24 years and all the time I felt like a prisoner in my own shop. I would look out the windows and doors and see school kids grow up into men and women and have kids and I was still walled in. So when the chance to sellout came I jumped at it not realizing that I was in a happy prison. I found the outside world had changed so much I hardly knew how to cope with it. I was too old for this and too young for that. So I just let myself drift along and] not accomplishing anything." This account neglects to mention the main sorrow of his adult life. He became a widower in 1945 when Sally died at the age of 32. Sally's family was also extraordinary in its own different way. She was orphaned at twelve and had scarlet fever in her early teens, which led to an undiagnosed (but very real) heart problem, causing chronic weakness and shortness of breath, which she never allowed to get in her way. She seems to have had a deliberately cheerful outlook on life but also a degree of thoughtfulness—she used to instruct Ernie, "Ask the librarian to find me a deep book"—and was a gentle and protective mother. A sign of her maternal carefulness was her personal celebration of Armistice Day. For most of his adult life, Ernie remembered that his mother was born on November 11, 1911. Pop, however, wrote that she was born on October 11, 1912 [[Document: Bertha (Sally) Werner's dates].

A record of Bertha's baptism, which puts her birthdate at October 11, 1912, shows that Pop was right. Ernie wrote, however, that "Pop surely got my mother's birthdate wrong by placing it in October, it was November 11. I think she was born on Armistice Day & once told me that the public celebrations on that day made her think as a girl that it had something to do with her birthday."114 "And I remember her lively response to Poppy Day when I was a boy living on York Street (we moved away at the beginning of my 4th grade.) She used to recite that poem: 'In Flanders Fields ...' And buy a red paper poppy from somebody in the street."115 What led to this confusion about her birth date? Let us respect her son's memory and assume that Armistice Day did have a deep meaning for her. I am convinced, however, that she associated that day—November 11—not with her own birthday on October 11 but with her mother's death. Lottie Cheesman Crane died on November 11, 1923, when Bertha was eleven. The armistice had been signed in 1918 on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. All those elevens in the mind of an eleven-year-old girl who lost her mother on that day! I feel that Sally (Bertha) must not have wanted to worry or sadden her own young children by speaking about their grandmother's premature death at the age of 37, when she was pregnant with the child who would have been her ninth. Ernie does not remember that Sally ever mentioned her mother. Instead, she privately memorialized her mother and her unborn sibling by buying a poppy.

After Sally's own premature death, her son, Ernie, 13, was sent away to a Lutheran boarding school and her daughter, Shirley, 11, took on much of the household work of a grown woman. Shirley remembers that Grandmom, as always, provided comforting and steadfast support; Anna would often surprise Shirley by bringing over a dinner for the family, and she kept a beautiful garden in her own yard that was a source of wonder to her granddaughter.

Pop's sense of being confined in his own bakery, looking out at the world passing by, reveals perhaps not only his loss, but from a more positive point of view his sense that there was a wider perspective on life that might be attained if a person were given the chance. This perspective was embodied in the physical things he made and acquired, objects that always pointed to the possibility of discovery and exploration. He designed and built a wooden boat. He gave an elegant little chess set to his son, who cherishes it to this day. He bought a microscope, a pair of binoculars, and a Polaroid camera, the same camera that took many of the pictures we have of him. He was always generous to his grandchildren, both with his time and with his gifts. He sometimes gave us silver dollars that he had saved when customers paid with them at the bake shop.

These reflections about Pop and his family were inspired by my daughter, Benita Xiaogu Johnson, who chose Pop as the ancestor to research for a sixth-grade Social Studies project and wrote a beautiful report. Benita wrote, "He is no longer with us, but the Century Bakery lives on." Indeed, the Century Bakery of Bridgeton does still exist, although it has moved one mile away from the corner of Bank and Cedar Streets to 525 North Pearl Street. It is amusing to see the current owners' boast at http://www.centurybakery.com: "Family owned and operated for four generations." [Century Bakery today]

Pop's spirit lives on as an inspiration, not only to the bakers of Bridgeton, but to all of us who have traveled in our own individual Odysseys.

1918 comes

begin the endless journey

through dust and snow banks,

frozen ground and grass

tired legs plodding ahead,

finally it ends

aboard the steamboat

chugging to America

a new life at last116

Epilogue: Two German-Russian Families with Their Own Unique Stories

The histories of the Werner and Goertz families fit in with much of what we know about Germans in Russia, and yet these families were also unusual in some ways and showed their own streak of independence. Many Germans, lured by Catherine the Great's offer of religious freedom, exemption from Russian military service, and temporary exemption from taxes, had immigrated to the Volga and Black Sea regions of Russia between 1762 and the mid-nineteenth century and had become Russian subjects. But "[t]he late eighteenth-century invitation to immigrants to come and settle broad expanses of available land on the steppe came to an end in the nineteenth century, primarily because in the postemancipation decades rapid population growth led to a serious arable land shortage in many parts of the empire."117 Of Pop's great-grandparents, only the Klinks participated in this earlier movement, having emigrated from Bavaria to Ukraine before Pop's paternal grandmother Caroline was born in 1845. The Werners and Goertzes came later, in perhaps 1860 and in 1871, respectively. The early German-Russians were encouraged to establish villages and settlements where German was taught in the schools and German was spoken in the community at large. This was not the experience of either the Goertzes or the Werners. The Goertzes went first to the frontier town of Orenburg—which lay at the farthest eastern boundary of the area settled by the Volga Germans—before they moved west to the Black Sea region. The Werners settled in or near Bolshoy Tokmak, a Russian Orthodox village with a mixed population, in Ukraine.

Although we do not know precisely when Ludwig came to Russia, the fact that his son Adolph, born in Ukraine, later served in the Prussian army shows that the family and their descendants not only never gained Russian citizenship but strove to maintain their citizenship within the German empire. This political status contrasted with that of many German-Russians in Russia, who, despite their ethnic identity as German speakers, had Russian citizenship and diverse political leanings; Russian-Germans ultimately supported various sides in the revolution. The fate of the Werners was also different, then, from the fates of most other Russian-Germans. Millions of Russian-Germans were not able to leave when the armistice between Germany and Russia was signed in early 1918 but remained behind in Russia. The Volga Germans, whose exile to Siberia during the war had been planned by the military leaders but was rescinded by Lenin before it was carried out, were established as the Autonomous Communes of Volga German Workers in 1918 and became the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (the Volga German ASSR) in July 1924, a political arrangement that allowed some six hundred thousand Volga Germans to have, once again, "some autonomous German language institutions."118 During collectivization under Stalin in the 1930s, however, many of these Germans were executed under the charge that they were "counterrevolutionaries." In summer 1941 the Germans attacked the USSR, the Volga German ASSR was abolished, and Russia's Germans were "almost entirely" deported to Kazakhstan, North Caucasus, and Siberia. "In 1942 nearly all of the able-bodied German population was conscripted into Soviet labor armies," and hundreds of thousands starved or were worked to death.119 Of the survivors, many emigrated to Germany after World War II, and others to Canada, the United States, and Latin America. In 1948, the Germans who remained in the Soviet Union were permanently banished to the east, but after Stalin's death this banishment was lifted. Many Germans largely assimilated into Russian society. "There were some 2 million ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union in 1989." After perestroika in 1986 there was "a massive emigration of Germans from the Soviet Union."

The fact that the Werners were German citizens made it possible for them to leave Russia after World War I so that they could, according to the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, be repatriated into the German Empire.

The Werners may be contrasted to the Mitulskis and Thiessens and to many other Russian-Germans in another way. Despite their first American jobs in the orchards at Seabrook Farms and their various rural occupations in Siberia, the family were fundamentally artisans, machinery manufacturers, and practitioners of trades rather than farmers. It must have seemed natural to them to settle in populous New Jersey, with its diverse economic opportunities, rather than go to the empty, open plains of Oklahoma or Kansas like the Thiessens and the Mitulskis, who sought out German-Russian communities in order to continue their wheat-farming ways. These families often continued to speak German at home for many years after arrival. The Werners followed a different path: that of assimilation. Even in Russia they had been open to other cultural influences around them. They had learned Russian in school and from the community around them; they enjoyed Russian dishes; they chose a Russian middle name for their son, Franz; and Adolph's sister, Amalia, married a Russian and stayed in Russia for the rest of her life. Pop could sing plaintive Russian songs as well as rousing German ones. But in coming to this country, they resolved to become thoroughly American. They gained citizenship and learned always to speak English in the bake shop and at home; they went to school when they were able to, served in the armed forces, bought American cars and embraced American goals, and married young women who had been born in America. Bertha Elizabeth Crane—the wife of Ernst Oscar Werner, born in Bolshoy Tokmak in 1907—was, although she seems not to have known it, descended from Jasper Crane (1605–81), himself an immigrant from England and a distinguished early colonist, landowner, and magistrate who took the oath of fidelity at the organization of the government of New Haven Colony and who helped design the town plan. Later, this ambitious man helped to establish the colony of Newark, New Jersey. Jasper's great-great-grandson, Moses Crane (1753–1835), was an itinerant Methodist minister who fought in the Revolutionary War. _Aber das ist eine andere Geschichte und soll ein andermal erzählt werden._ 120 But all that is the subject of another story.

ENDNOTES

1. Source: Ernie's cousin Albert Ernest Werner (b. August 9, 1930), private genealogy notes, in the section Individual summary for Martin Goertz. Throughout this narrative, the name Al refers to this cousin—Pop's nephew—while the name Uncle Al refers to his father, Adalbert Konstantin Werner (b. November 9, 1905), Pop's second-eldest brother. My father, Ernest Gustav Werner (Ernie), was born on October 16, 1931.

2. Roger P. Bartlett, _Human Capital: The Settlement of Foreigners in Russia, 1762–1804_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 5.

3. S. M. Eisfeld, "Germans: Christian Communities of Kazakhstan, Tadzhikistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan," in _Encyclopedic Ethnography of Middle-East and Central Asia_ , ed. R. Khanam, 3 vols. (New Delhi: Global Vision, 2005), 1:225–30, at 227.

4. Eisfeld, "Germans," 1:227.

5. Eisfeld, "Germans," 1:226: "Countless German settlements were founded in the Orenburg District, northern Kasakhstan, western Siberia, and Kirgizia at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, and were left largely undisturbed during World War II."

6. Bartlett, _Human Capital_ , 5–13, observes that Orenburg Province "provides a case study of eighteenth-century Russian internal colonization and development, as well as a clear picture of the kind of population elements involved."

7. At <http://www.osu.ru/doc/2206>. The site informs us: "Orenburg was both a trading town and a fortress that protected Russia from nomadic cattle-breeders and worriers." Russians had enough to worry about without letting those nomadic worriers in!

8. Al's records.

9. The estimate assumes a typical pattern: that Ludwig was married when he was about twenty-three, that Caroline became pregnant soon after their marriage, that the children were born two years apart from each other, and that all the children lived to adulthood. But of course any of these factors could be different, and thus Ludwig could have been born considerably earlier than 1845.

10. A Google search conducted on December 18, 2013, for "Valdorf, Ukraine" finds, at <http://www.gomapper.com/travel/where-is/valdorf-located.html>, the information: "Valdorf is a place with a very small population in the province of Zaporiska Oblast, Ukraine." The nearest marked place on the map is Zhovtneve; Tokmak is the closest larger town, about five miles away to the southeast along the modern P37 road. The "German Russian Village List" at <http://www.grhs.org/vr/vc-other.htm> confirms that Waldorf is a village in the Nowo Nikolajewka rayon (a post-Soviet administrative district, below the oblast level); the closest large city is Zaporoshje.

11. John R. Staples, _Cross-Cultural Encounters on the Ukrainian Steppe: Settling the Molochna Basin, 1783–1861_ , Tsarist and Soviet Mennonite Studies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003).

12. Staples, _Cross-Cultural Encounters_ , 6.

13. Catherine reigned from July 9, 1762–November 17, 1796; Paul I from 1796–March 23, 1801; Alexander I from 1801–December 1, 1825; Nicholas I from 1825–March 2, 1855; Alexander II from 1855–March 13, 1881 (a liberal; under his rule, the domestic serfs and serfs on private land were liberated in 1861; state-owned serfs were liberated in 1866); Alexander III from 1881–October 20, 1894 (reactionary; under his rule, mandatory teaching in Russian was instituted in schools); Nicholas II from November 1, 1894, until his enforced abdication on March 2, 1917.

14. For details on the origins of the various Nogai groups who came to the Black Sea area, see Staples, _Cross-Cultural Encounters_ , 32–33.

15. Ibid., 42.

16. Ibid., 29.

17. Ibid., 65.

18. Ibid., 150. In this passage Staples gives 1783 as the date at which Bolshoy Tokmak was established. The population statistics cited here were reported by Wilhelm Bernhard Bauman, "the agronomist assigned by the Ministry of State Domains in 1844 to administer the Bolshoi Tokmak repartition" of land.

19. Ibid., 151.

20. Ibid., 42.

21. Ibid., 182.

22. Ibid., 134–35. "Fairs played a vital role in the Russian economy for a variety of reasons. First, because Russian peasants could not travel outside of their own districts, merchants had to come to them. At the same time, before 1863 townsmen were not permitted to operate shops in peasant villages, and fairs helped circumvent this rule. Finally, following changes to tariff laws in 1822, trade at fairs was duty free, making prices particularly attractive," 133. On Bolshoy Tokmak as a place of Jewish settlement, see also <http://www.jewishgen.org/ukraine/GEO_town.asp?id=197>, with link to <http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/Colonies_of_Ukraine/tokmak.htm>.

23. Staples, _Cross-Cultural Encounters_ , 104.

24. Ibid., 125.

25. Ibid., 171–72.

26. Eric Lohr, _Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union_ (Cumberland (R.I.): Harvard University Press, 2012), 62.

27. Lohr, _Russian Citizenship_ , "The Forgotten Great Reforms," 47–53; quotations from 49.

28. Ibid., 47–48.

29. Ibid., 85.

30. Ibid., 54.

31. Al's Individual summary for Ludwig Gustav Werner.

32. Al's notes, taken down from remarks made by his father Adalbert (Uncle Al) over a long period of time.

33. Al's Individual summary for Adolph Gustav Werner. It isn't entirely clear what dialect this was. "Because of his Army time, he spoke the 'real German', the others spoke 'Schwab?', like the Pennsylvania Dutch." The Pennsylvania Dutch are a somewhat confusing comparison to make, since their dialect is a mixture of and development from Alemannic dialects. In any case, Swabian wouldn't have been spoken by the Goertzes and Werners from Prussia. They would have spoken a Low German dialect. Ernie remembers that his family would roll their r's on the tip of the tongue rather than in the throat. "Grandmom would also say, Er ist y-gangen (Y-sound instead of the hard G.)" The only Swabian-speaking ancestor was Caroline Klink, whose parents came from Bavaria.

As for rolling the r's, I am grateful to Werner Schubert for writing to me: "In Deutschland gibt es beides; das Zungen-r scheint das ursprünglichere zu sein; das Rachen-r wurde im 17. Jh. in den Städten zuerst gebräuchlich und ist auf französischen Einfluss zurückzuführen." (In Germany there are both. The tongue-rolled r seems to be more original; the throat-r was first used in cities in the seventeenth century and can be traced back to French influence.) For details see Adolf Bach, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 9th ed. Wiesbaden, n.d. (after 1969), p. 312, no. 154.

34. Al's notes. It isn't clear to me whether this statement means that they couldn't make enough money to live on or whether it means that they couldn't make enough farm machinery to keep up with demand.

35. Lohr, _Russian Citizenship_ , 123.

36. Anne Volokh with Mavis Manus, _The Art of Russian Cuisine_ (New York: Macmillan, 1983), 197. Volokh also quotes an amusing passage from Nikolai Gogol's short story, "Christmas Eve," in which a varenik leaps out of a bowl, splashes into a bowl of sour cream, and flies straight into the mouth of the glutton Patsiuk.

37. For the dough: 4 c. flour (add more if necessary while kneading), 2 eggs, 1 c. milk, 2 t. salt. Knead until firm and very elastic. Roll out with a rolling pin or—breaking with Ukrainian tradition—use a pasta machine. Cut into squares, stretch if necessary to make slightly thinner, and fill. For the cheese: 3 large (1 1/2 lb.) containers of low-fat or nonfat cottage cheese (rinsed until the water runs clean, and hung to dry in a cheesecloth overnight in a cold place) or an equivalent amount of dry farmer's cheese curds, 4 egg yolks, approx. 1/2 c. sour cream, approx. 1 T. salt. To seal vareniky, it helps to brush egg white along one edge of the dough square and to press the edges with a fork or use a dumpling press (these sealing techniques are American innovations). Refrigerate the vareniky after forming them or, for an authentic Trumansburg Werner touch, store them in a frigid garage. Boil the chilled dumplings for about 12 minutes. Serve with melted butter, salt, and sour cream. Yield will be approximately 50–60 vareniky.

38. Lohr, _Russian Citizenship_ , 127.

39. Ibid., 121–22.

40. Eric Lohr, _Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I_ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 122.

41. Lohr, _The Campaign against Enemy Aliens_ , 10.

42. Lohr, _Russian Citizenship_ , 119. See also Lohr, _The Campaign against Enemy Aliens_ , 125.

43. Lohr, _Russian Citizenship_ , 126.

44. Ibid., 120.

45. Lohr, _The Campaign against Enemy Aliens_ , 125.

46. Ibid., 126.

47. Ibid., 155.

48. Ibid., 127.

49. Ibid., 128, fig. 9. Another map at 141, fig. 10, shows the Pale of Jewish settlement before the expulsion of the Jews and the areas where Jews were forcibly resettled after their expulsion [Map: Pale of Jewish settlement]. It is interesting to see that the Taurida region of Ukraine where Bolshoy Tokmak is situated was within this latter (constricted) area within the Pale. Jews—who often had Russian citizenship—suffered under different policies from those that were directed against enemy aliens, and they were also victims of pogroms instigated by Cossacks and regular Russian troops.

50. Lohr, _The Campaign against Enemy Aliens_ , 155.

51. Al's Individual summary for Albert Werner; Pop's letter to Shirley, April or May 1978. In his letter, Pop says that the name "Oranburg" has been changed to Kubishev. In fact, Samara is the city whose name was changed to Kuybyshev from 1935–91; it is now once again known as Samara. Since that name change took place long after Pop lived in Russia, we can safely assume that he meant Orenburg rather than Samara.

52. Viktor Diesendorf, Geschichte der Wolgadeutschen, <http://www.schuk.ru/1/katalog/map.html>. The site, "History of the village Schuck," is largely in Russian, but if you scroll down to the link for "Geschichte der Wolgadeutschen," you can click on a letter of the alphabet to go to a list of German villages beginning with that letter. This part of the website is in German. I found the information about Tutschkino (or Tschutschino) there, with the remark, "Die Kolonie ist geographisch nicht mehr eindeutig nachweisbar. Sie wurde von Schwarzmeerdeutschen gegründet." It should be noted that even if the Werners' Tutschky might be hypothetically linked with Tutschkino, I do not know enough about Russian to explain the -no suffix.

53. From the Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii Collection (Library of Congress), available at Wikimedia Commons. See also <http://www.prokudin-gorsky.ru/English/index.shtml>. On the technical method used by Prokudin-Gorsky for his color photography, see the Wikipedia article.

54. Lohr, _Russian Citizenship_ , 128–29.

55. Ibid., 130.

56. Eisfeld, "Germans," 1:227: "In the winter of 1915–1916 approximately 200,000 Germans were deported from Volhynia to other parts of the country. All Germans were to have been deported ... to Siberia and Central Soviet Asia by the end of 1917, a plan that could never fully be put into effect because of the Revolution in 1917." By 1895, most of the Volhynia Germans had become Russian citizens because of an 1887 edict that "banned foreign subjects from buying, leasing, or acquiring landed property in Kiev, Podolia, and Volynia in any other way except through inheritance." As a result, "immigrants rushed to naturalize to avoid the restrictions," Lohr, Russian Citizenship, 70-71. But see Lohr, 126, for the limited protection that citizenship afforded Russian-subject Germans under these wartime measures. "[E]thnicity could trump citizenship when decisions were taken on categories of people to include or exempt from sanctions. Russian-subject Germans were included in several of the measures initially applied only to enemy subjects." These sanctions "ranged from deportation to expropriation of land and liquidation of businesses."

57. For a translation of the treaty, see <http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/bl34.asp#art17a>. Russian census figures show that very large numbers of Germans remained in Russia: in 1918, over 1.62 million were counted; in 1926, almost 1.24 million. By way of comparison with prewar census records, in 1914 almost 2.42 million Germans were counted living in the Russian Empire; in central Russia (not including the Baltic area, eastern Poland, and Volhynia), the count was 1.7 million Germans. For these figures, see the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection hosted by the North Dakota State University Libraries,  http://library.ndsu.edu/grhc/history_culture/history/landsmannschaft.html.

58. This may need nuance. Bartlett, _Human Capital_ , xiii–xiv: The Volga Germans "were the first ethnic group to receive autonomous status under Soviet rule, with the creation in 1918 of the Autonomous Workers' Commune of the Volga German Region, transformed in 1924 into the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of the Volga Germans. But with the German invasion of Russia in 1941, accusations of treason were made against them. They were deported eastward, with other exiled national groups, and their republic abolished; subsequent rehabilitation measures have stopped short of its reconstitution. More generally, the descendants of Catherine II's immigrants are today members of national minority groups in the Soviet Union, or have been assimilated into Soviet society. Many also re-emigrated, in the last decades of the Imperial regime and during the Soviet period: ... for example, ... Swedish re-emigrants from the Ukraine have returned to Sweden." Bartlett refers not only to German but to Swedish, Swiss, Greek, Bulgarian, and other foreign settlers.

59. Al, Individual summary for Adolph Gustav Werner.

60. Shirley Ganly, "The Wedding Ring," 2011.

61. K. David Patterson, "Typhus and Its Control in Russia, 1870–1940," _Medical History_ 37 (1993) 361–81, at 373. It was known already in 1906 that typhus occurred only when lice were present, 372–73. On lice, see 367–68.

62. Al's Individual summary for Albert Werner. Uncle Al could only speculate how he ended up in the Russian soldiers' hospital in the first place.

63. Lohr, _Russian Citizenship_ , 124.

64. Patterson, "Typhus," 379.

65. Ibid., 380.

66. Quotation from Ernie's email, November 20, 2013. Helen associated the paper clothing with Ellis Island, but I have not found any other evidence that immigrants were given paper clothing at Ellis Island.

67. Al's Individual summary for Albert Werner. Al writes, "School paper in file."

68. S.S. Susquehanna manifest.

69. Al's notes record that one of Ludwig's children was married in Tutschky. The notes connect this event with Amalia, but Al is doubtful about whether Amalia was married in Siberia; she would probably have been in her late thirties then, and she had two children after her marriage. It seems plausible, however, that her younger brother Gustav was married there.

70. Al's notes.

71. Wikipedia: "The Treaty of Versailles required that the newly formed state have its own citizenship, based on residency. German inhabitants lost their German citizenship with the creation of the Free City, but were given the right to re-obtain it within the first two years of the state's existence. Anyone desiring German citizenship had to leave their property and make their residence outside of the Free State of Danzig area in the remaining parts of Germany."

72. Al's notes.

73. Janet Levine, Ellis Island Oral History Project, Series E1, No. 520: Interview of Morris Mildener, August 4, 1994.

74. See especially the Naval Historical Center's online library of selected images of U.S. Navy ships at <http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/usnsh-s/id3016.htm>; and, for close-up views of the engine room, machine shop, dispensary, officers' mess spaces, and other places on board, <http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/usnsh-s/id3016-o.htm> and <http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/usnsh-s/id3016-p.htm>.

75. Hesiod, _Theogony_ 26–28: ποιμένες ἄγρουλοι, κάκ' ἐλέγχεα, γαστέρες οἶον, / ἴδμεν ψεύδεα πολλὰ λέγειν ἐτύμοισιν ὁμοῖα, / ἴδμεν δ' εὖτ' ἐθέλωμεν ἀληθέα γηρύσασθαι ("Field-dwelling shepherds, ignoble disgraces, mere bellies: we know how to say many false things similar to genuine ones, but we know, when we wish, how to proclaim true things"). Trans. by Glenn W. Most, _Hesiod: Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia_ , Loeb Classical Library 57 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).

76. Wikipedia article,  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Germans_in_Russia_and_the_Soviet_Union. Although the article needs additional citations for verification, these basic remarks seem consistent with other accounts.

77. Lohr, _Russian Citizenship_ , 69.

78. Ibid., 70–71.

79. Chortitza was also known as the Alt-Kolonie. See the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online at  http://gameo.org/index.php?title=Chortitza_Mennonite_Settlement_(Zaporizhia_Oblast,_Ukraine)). It is interesting to see that the first census, of October 14, 1797, includes six families named Thiessen: <http://www.mennonitegenealogy.com/russia/Chortitza_1797.htm>. In the 1847 census, there are a number of Thiessens, including three men whose names are variants of Dietrich: <http://www.mennonitegenealogy.com/russia/Chortitza_1847.htm>.

80. Oklahoma, Find a Grave Index, 1800–2012. They are buried in the nondenominational Clinton Cemetery.

81. Why did the earlier manifest have the name "Thienen" instead of "Thiessen"? The name could have been misread from a handwritten cursive notation in which the double "ss" of Thiessen was mistaken for a lowercase "n."

82. This whole story may be qualified or compromised by the fact that there are other immigrants named Dietrich Thiessen with Russian or German-Russian origins. None of them, however, has as close a connection with the circumstances of the Werner family as the Thiessen family described above. These others are: (1) Diedrich Thiessen, age 40, and son Diedrich, age 7, arrived July 2, 1878, on the ship Strassburg sailing from Bremen. They were Germans from Russia. I can't find further records of their residence in the U.S. (2) Diedrich H. Thiessan (note the spelling), age 63, was living in Hayes Township, McPherson County, Kansas, in 1920. He had immigrated in 1877 and gained citizenship in 1906. His place of birth was Russia and his mother tongue was recorded as Russian. His wife, Anna, was 52, and immigrated in 1879. (3) Dietrich J. Thiessen, age 31, was living in Deep Creek, Major County, Oklahoma, in 1920. He had been born in Kansas about 1889; his parents were both born in Russia.

83. Lohr, _Russian Citizenship_ , 87–88.

84.  http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/g/ge008.html.

85.  http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/C/CO031.html.

86. <http://www.booknoise.net/johnseabrook/stories/index.html>.

87. John Seabrook, "Marriage of the Century," 339.

88. Ibid., 340.

89. Ibid., 337.

90. John Seabrook, "My Father's Closet," The New Yorker, March 16, 1998.

91. John Seabrook, "Marriage of the Century," 339.

92. Al, email, December 9, 2013.

93. John M. Seabrook, "The Henry Ford of Agriculture: Charles F. Seabrook 1881–1964 and Seabrook Farms 1893–1959" (Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center, 1995), 37–38. Published in cooperation with the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.

94. John M. Seabrook, "The Henry Ford of Agriculture," 38.

95. John Seabrook, "The Spinach King."

96. John M. Seabrook, "The Henry Ford of Agriculture."

97. Ibid., 11 and 13.

98. Ibid., 14.

99. I can find no passenger records for C. F. before 1923 in the New York Passenger Lists searchable on ancestry.com.

100. John M. Seabrook, "The Henry Ford of Agriculture," 9.

101. Ernie, email, November 30, 2013.

102. On education in Russia:  http://library.ndsu.edu/grhc/history_culture/history/landsmannschaft.html states that the year was 1891. This date, 1891, is also confirmed by the "History of the Village Schuck" page, http://www.schuk.ru.

103. Al's notes about his mother: "Moved to Millville [from Woonsocket, Massachusetts,] when about six (6) years old. Father was Ukranian and Mother was Polish. He liked her name Louisa and she used Olga. School teachers used Lillian and last name changing it to Komer (a to e). However, a birth affidavit dated 1928 used Komer with the 'e'." Elsewhere he writes, "She remembers her dad leaving, suitcase on one arm, bedroll on the other, and he had a limp when he walked. He was going back to Europe. His trade was [working as] a tailor of sheepskin coats. Married in Mount Pleasant United Methodist Church, Millville, New Jersey."

104. Petition no. 2843438, vol. 10, no. 1070.

105. Al, email, December 7, 2013.

106. Al, notes.

107. Al, email, December 7, 2013.

108. Ernie remembered, informally, that they lived on York Street until the beginning of his fourth grade, and that Grandmom (Anna) at one point lived down the street. The 1940 census shows Pop with his family still living on York Street, and Anna living at 59 Bank Street with Uncle Bill. This location is near the corner of Bank and Cedar Streets.

109. I am puzzled that I have not yet located anyone in Uncle Al's family—or Josephine Komer, his mother-in-law—on the 1940 census. Al wrote, "The first bakery that they bought was on Vine Street in Bridgeton, we lived in the house in front of that. It was next to Vine Street School where I went for the first couple of years and we moved across the street from the school after that and [I] was there until either my seventh or ninth grade when we moved to Bank Street where the [Century] bakery was built, virtually in the back yard." Ernie remembers that Uncle Al and his family lived as renters for a while with Grandmom [Anna], and that he and his sister Shirley also stayed with her for a while as preschoolers when their mother was in the sanitarium. This must have been in the house on Vine Street. Al's family would have moved to Bank Street either in 1942 or 1944. He would have lived next to the school until about 1938 and moved across the street after that. So we would expect to see him on the 1940 census living on Vine Street.

110. Anna also stated that she was 57 years old and had completed grade 4 and that she was a citizen. She declared that she was born in "Russia" and that her father and mother were both born in Germany (defined as "the country in which birthplace was situated on January 1, 1937"; at that time, this would have been Danzig), that she was 18 at first marriage, and that she had had 7 children.

111. Al's notes.

112. Original data: Electronic Army Serial Number Merged File, 1938-1946 [Archival Database]; ARC: 1263923. World War II Army Enlistment Records; Records of the National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 64; National Archives at College Park. College Park, Maryland, U.S.A.

113. Ernie, email, November 30, 2013.

114. Ernie, email, October 17, 2013.

115. Ernie, email, October 19, 2013.

116. This haiku, "Poem for Making History," was written by Benita on October 15, 2013, as a part of her Social Studies project.

117. Lohr, _Russian Citizenship_ , 60.

118.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Germans_in_Russia_and_the_Soviet_Union.

119. Ibid.

120. Michael Ende, _Die unendliche Geschichte_ (Stuttgart: Thienemann, 1979). Trans. by Ralph Manheim as _The Neverending Story_ (Garden City: Doubleday, 1983).

###

**Acknowledgments:**

My profound thanks go to all those who shared with me their memories, materials, and time, and especially to my father, Ernest G. Werner (Ernie), whose sharp memory never forgot the names Bolshoy Tokmak and Tutschky; to my father's cousin Albert E. Werner (Al), who provided me with invaluable notes that he had taken down from his father's (Uncle Al's) memories over a long period of time and who patiently responded to my many questions; to my aunt Shirley Ganly (née Shirley Anna Werner), who entrusted me with Pop's precious notebook; to my sister Helen Werner Cox, who provided me with digital images of Pop's irreplaceable letters, which I had thought lost; and to John Seabrook, son of John M. Seabrook (Jack), who kindly encouraged me to talk to his father. To Jack Seabrook I am grateful for his long and deeply informative conversation with me about the earlier years at Seabrook Farms. Finally, I belatedly thank my grandfather, Ernest Oscar Werner, for his indefatigable spirit.

**About the author:**

Shirley Werner was born it matters not where but grew up in Trumansburg, New York. She acquired an education at Brandeis University, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Yale University and holds a doctorate from Yale. She has taught Latin and Greek. Her home is in Chapel Hill, where she lives with her husband and daughter.

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