Forry knows very little about his family. A couple of years ago we were contacted by a lady from Portland, Oregon, Sherrie Stahl, who gave us information about his great-grandfather Konrad (Conrad?) Hardt who was a shopkeeper in the village of Brunnenthal, Samaria, Volga, Russia. Ms Stahl has made a study of the village and its inhabitants. Forry had not even know his great-grandfather's name before our contact with her.
When we saw the brochure, we decided to stay in Bismarck an extra day in order to visit the Society and see what information they might have. They are housed in a lovely building a few miles from the KOA Kampground.
The building is full of books, ledgers and microfiche records. But, we were very disappointed to discover they had NO information at all about the Germans who were in the Volga area. Their records are all of a later group that came from the Black Sea area.
The very nice lady at the front desk told us that while they had archives of the Black Sea groups, there was another set of archives in Lincoln, Nebraska that were focused on the Volga Germans...
I wish we would have known that earlier this year when we were in that state...
No comments:
Post a Comment