|  The
Black Sea Germans in the Dakotas
Book review by Edna Boardman, Bismarck, North Dakota
George Rath gives a fact-filled overview of the Black Sea Germans
who settled in the Dakotas -- as the title indicates. The book is
now in its fourth printing and has shown itself to be of enduring
interest to persons who are interested in Germans from Russia settlement
patterns in the two states, and who seek references to their ancestral
villages and families.
Rath begins with a look at the original Black Sea settlements
themselves -- the colony groups, the provinces (though not usually
the villages) from which their inhabitants originated in Germany,
and their culture. He traces their emigration to the Dakotas and
identifies where they settled area by area. For some towns in the
Dakotas, he lists all the churches; for others, just the churches
with a preponderance of German-Russians as members. Additional chapters
focus on the role and scope of the major Protestant denominations
to which German Russians were attracted. A final part of the book
lists Protestant seminaries that trained German-Russian ministers,
a list of publications favored by them (some English language, some
German), a rundown of religious literature, biographical sketches
of ten German-Russian leaders, and miscellaneous statistics and
facts.
He is generally very aware of German-Russian religious devotion
-- the church, after all, was their institution of choice -- but
one can hardly call him objective on religious matters. Catholic
settlements, while not entirely ignored, have limited information
about them. Though he understands the range of Protestant religious
affiliation, he has something of a blind spot where Mennonites and
Hutterites are concerned. He includes labeled paragraphs on Harvey
and Velva, ND, in which the Catholic churches are listed, but he
doesn't mention at all the two thriving all Germans from Russia
Mennonite Brethren churches. He doesn't like chiliasts (separatists
who believed that Christ would return soon) very much, and was clearly
upset when the Evangelical United Brethren and Methodist Churches
combined to form the United Methodist Church in 1968.
Rath notes the German-Russian talent for hard work and their hunger
for land. He is aware of public German-Russian culture: newspapers,
the Germans from Germany who were sometimes their neighbors, and
language change. He records facts about church and community history
and interests himself in the origins of place names. He includes
lots of interesting incidental details. For example, he gives a
list of immigrants who crossed the Atlantic on the ship Thuringia
but does not provide other passenger lists.
A patient researcher, Rath says he "labored for many years" to
collect the material for this book. He combed a tall stack of books
plus newspapers, small town jubilee books, and minutes of official
church conferences. The book contains lots of numbers, maps, some
black and white photographs, and some family names, but more, the
names of officials and ministers. He includes chapter notes, which
may prove useful to persons seeking their family history. The book
is dated 1977, but the most recent specific reference this reviewer
noted was 1968 (the oldest 1873). He uses "at present," "now," and
"currently" and is very specific about membership numbers and places
where services are held, but the reader is never quite sure when
"now" refers to because change in the countryside was quite rapid
in the mid decades of the twentieth century when he gathered his
material. He says of the Germans from Russia, "Wheat raising was
the object of their lives," and, from the vantage point of the 1970s,
he foresees stability and continuity well into the future.
Rath is not a trained historian. His work is uneven, he injects
personal opinion, and he certainly does not tell everything a reader
might want to know. His writing style is bumpy, his punctuation
is uncertain, and sometimes he spells a word two or three different
ways within a few pages. (He needed an editor or maybe just the
help of a high school English teacher.) If you can forgive this,
and the scope of the book suits your research needs, you will find
it a fun browser and an excellent taking-off point for further reading.
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