My dad's Aunt Helen, and his cousins Sandy and Linda, gave me a copy of a Weigandt Pleve chart yesterday they received from another person researching his mother's Weigandt family line to/in Russia. I believe the chart goes back to when our family emigrated from Germany to the Volga region of Russia.
Families emigrated from various parts of Germany in response to the manifesto of Katherine the Great, a German Princes, in 1763. This same stream of emigration also brought the Pennsylvania "Dutch" to the American colonies. They were allowed to retain their own language, customs and religion. After the freeing of the serfs in Russia in 1861, the reforms that followed greatly changed the status of the German colonists. Their local self-government was gradually being interfered with and military serviced forced upon them. With this came a great emigration in the 1870s in large numbers to South America, Canada and the United States. In the States they mainly settled in Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas since this region most resembled where they came from. Nebraska being the central hub. These groups of individuals were often referred to as Russian Germans, or White Russians.
My Great Grand father Jacob Weigandt arrived in America 9 Nov 1911, emigrating from Hook, Russia to settle in Lincoln, Nebraska. My Aunt Helen is first Generation American along with her brother, my grandfather, Albert Weigandt. Jacob's brother, Oswald, traveled with him but was denied entry due to possibly having pink eye. He then traveled to and settled in Argentina where we now have distant cousins
More about Jacob, his first wife Mary and his second wife Katherine (sister to Mary) during another post. I can't wait to study the chart further and to figure out our Weigandt line.
