Prepared by Tim Janzen
This site makes available the extractions of material from three important documents relating to the earliest settlers in the Yazykovo Colony in South Russia. These documents provide us with a significant amount of information that had not been generally available previously.
The Yazykovo Colony was founded in 1869 as a daughter colony of the Chortitza Colony and was located just northwest of the Chortitza Colony on property purchased from the Russian nobleman Yazykov.
Probably the most important of the three documents is a census compiled January 15, 1873 of the residents of the Yazykovo Colony. Also of significant importance is a document which provides the 1858 Chortitza Colony census data for the inhabitants of the Yazykovo Colony in 1872 and 1873. Of lesser importance, but still of interest, is a census taken in 1869 of the inhabitants of the village of Nikolaifeld in the Yazykovo Colony. See the introductions to these documents for additional details about each one.
The originals of all three of these documents are found in the Zaporozhye State Archives in Zaporozhye, Ukraine. The files containing these documents were microfilmed in 1995 under the direction of Professor Harvey Dyck. Harvey Dyck released copies of the microfilms of these materials in April, 2001 to the following archives: the Mennonite Heritage Centre, Winnipeg, Manitoba; the Mennonite Historical Society of British Columbia, Clearbrook, B. C.; the Robarts Library and the Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario; and the Harvard Research Institute, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts.
© 2001 Mennonite Historical Society of Alberta
Last Updated 19 December 2001
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