Molotschna
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Molotschna Part I
Molotschna Part II
Molotschna Part III
Mol_trip.gif (2860 bytes)We spent two days in Molotschna, a colony with nearly 3-score villages.  Our ancestry had lived and worshipped in 24 or more of these villages.  We could not schedule all of them.  What were we looking for anyway?  How does one get a feel for Place?

We took two of the three tours to Molotschna.  The tour leaders primarily concentrated on Mennonite buildings that still existed.  Only a small number of buildings remained, and of those, most were constructed after the last of our particular forebears had left.  The sense of place would come from the experience of being there in a more abstract sense -- seeing the openness of the steppes, trying to imagine the kind of farms that then existed. 

Map of 19th Century Molotschna
Molotschna map with 19th century German names.  The blue and red lines indicate the two bus tours that we took.

There were, however, a few distinct buildings that our families would have known, most notably, churches in Alexanderwohl, Rückenau, and Ohrloff.  The streets are the roads that they traveled.  The threshing stones are those that they used.

Otherwise, we found places that gave us new memories.  The villages were now poor with little for the routine tourist to see.  Looking for photographs, it was often the windows that seemed to give a vision into the past, so they were often photographed.

Just to keep things from getting too cumbersome, this section is divided into three parts -- Molotschna I, II, and III.

Molotschna I Molotschna II Molotschna III