American Historical Society of Germans from Russia (AHSGR) WikiTree Challenge Highlights

Question

Hello WikiTreers!

WikiTree Challenge #6 is now complete. We spent a fun and collaborative week working together to build up an impressive list of ancestors based on the seven starting people chosen by the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia (AHSGR). We were challenged with finding records for Germans living in Russia and the United States. Once again, our group of researchers did a fantastic job of tracking down family members and documenting them on WikiTree.

Challenge participants added or connected more than 5,845 relatives for the seven starting people! The highest amount of people were added to the lines for Gabriel Loranz, who gained 1,057 relatives in one week! All seven of the lines were connected in unique ways to the global tree, with some being connected through multiple branches.

Altogether, more than 38 WikiTreers made 6,374 edits to connected profiles. Groups were quickly formed to tackle the more difficult lines, with emphasis on census records. 

MVP: Celia Marsh

Top Bounty Hunter: Celia Marsh

Team Captain: Cheryl Hess

All contributors ● Scoring explanation ● Research resources ● Connections to all contributors 

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Our seven starting profiles:

1. Louis (Lucas) John Kress: We connected 332 people to him, bringing his CC7 to 335.
2. Gabriel Loranz: We connected 1,057 people, bringing his CC7 to 1,197.
3. Friedrich Eichhorn: We connected 589, bringing his CC7 to 593.
4. Fredricka Hogue Schlittenhardt: We connected 477, bringing her CC7 to 480.
5. Johann Leonhard Stumpf: We connected 425, bringing his CC7 to 435.
6. Philip Reichert: We connected 347, bringing his CC7 to 2,002.
7. Karl Gräber: We connected 627, bringing his CC7 to 793.

Comments

Interesting Connections:

This year, 2023, is our "Year of Community Connections." So, we're looking for interesting connections between our starting people, and utilizing MyConnections, between starting people and others in their community. (Any time you are on a category page, you'll see a green MyConnections button in the corner. Click it to see how you are related to everyone in the category.)

Here are some of the connections we found this week:

• Peter Ketterling, born in 1898 in South Dakota, United States is five degrees from Friederika Hogue. Peter was a farmer and stood an impressive 6 feet 9 inches tall.
• Eugene Kugler was a jack of all trades, who owned the Kugler Tire Company in the mid 1950s. He is 19 degrees from Ransom Olds, whom the Oldsmobile and REO brands were named for, and 22 degrees from Horace Elgin Dodge, who invented one of the first all-steel cars in America with his brother John Francis Dodge.
• Aloysius (Alois) Steinbock migrated from Russia to the United States in 1905. His wife Elizabeth died twelve days after giving birth to triplets, with one dying as an infant. 17 degrees from him was Joseph Cushman. He was one of two surviving triplets. Joseph's ancestors were in the New England colonies as early as 1621, arriving from England aboard the Fortune.
• Louis "Lucas" John Kress was one of our starting people and migrated from Russia to the United States. He was considered a hero by Conrad Wuerz who wrote: 
  • One does not soon forget people like you who have done so many good deeds. Recently I was in Schilling and there was talk of you among people who had gathered together that you had once saved from death. They reminded me that I should write to you and thank you for the love you have shown them, without which they would otherwise no longer be alive.
• Coincidentally, Lucas is only 16 degrees from Samuel Clemens ("Mark Twain") and 17 degrees from Daniel Boone, both considered to be American heroes.

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More Interesting Discoveries:

• Barbara (Hagel) Ehlis, mother-in-law of Gabriel Loranz's eldest son Lambert, had 13 children. She lost her husband Andrew (age 45) to heart failure on 5 July 1944 in North Dakota, and then lost her eldest son Mark (age 23) in the Normandy invasion on 1 August 1944 in France.
• Freda (Woehl) Ketterling (1914-2017) is seven degrees from Frederika Hogue, a starting person. She survived a tornado that destroyed their farm in 1964. Freda lived to be 103!
• Phillip Reichert, a starting person, is three degrees from Anna "Annie" Wasinger Bahl. She had three young boys, ages 5, 6 and 7 that followed her husband on a short trip to view ice to fill a store house on 23 Feb 1906. He was not aware the children had followed him, until the youngest ran up to him to let him know that his brother had fallen through the ice. By the time he got there his other son had also fallen through the ice while trying to save his brother. Both sons died.
• Phillip's son Isidore was the third husband of Agatha Wasinger. Isidore's first wife died when their youngest was just one year old. All three of his daughters were put into foster care. Two of them, Emma and Mary, moved in with Isidore, his second wife Agatha, and her five children in a dugout that was built like a basement with a cover and roof over it (1913). They had two children together, bringing the total to nine children in the dugout. They also took in others, making it a blessing when they were able to buy a home in 1919.
• Clair Layman, 7 Degrees from Starting Profile Gabriel Loranz, is not only researcher Paul Smith's paternal 12th cousin, but he married his maternal 7th cousin Eslie Cantrell. He might never have known they existed were it not for this Challenge. 

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Watch the reveal on YouTube! 

Answer 1

Hello, 

I was wondering if any patrilineal descendants of the German Russian profiles have done any y-DNA testing? 

My interest stems from a potential relation that I have to the Sythian culture  an Eastern Iranian equestrian nomadic people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scythians) who had migrated from Central Asia to the Pontic Steppe in modern-day Ukraine and Southern Russia.

If not, I would like to express my hopes that some of the patrilineal descendants would consider running a y-DNA test to help build out this part of the tree of manking.

Thank you, 
Sven

Comments

They did live in the same area, but these two groups didn't interact much and certainly didn't inter-marry to my knowledge, at least not before 1917. What I've read is that Catherine the Great wanted German farmers in the area, in part because farmers were easier to tax and control than the nomads. My grandmother's grandfather died while "defending the village grain supply from the Cossacks". The Cossacks were semi-nomadic, and theoretically aligned with Russian czars at the time.

All that said, I have done a y-DNA test (male line descended from Germans from Russia in a Volga colony, but not one of the profiles selected for this challenge). My result was ... Irish, somehow. I'm thinking this happened in Germany before they migrated to Russia, but I'm not sure. I also need distant cousins to get tested. More people = more data.

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Thanks for sharing the story, and I agree we need more yDNA testers from this geographic background!