Analyzing the 1776 Census

For the last several months, I've been working on this huge project to analyze all the Fasts in the 1776 census of Mennonites in West Prussia.  My goal was to try to identify the parents of Gerhard Fast #660202 (1739-1828), my 7th-great-grandfather and earliest known Fast ancestor.  Since his oldest known sibling was born in ABT 1737, I realized that his parents would probably have been in their early 60s in the 1776 census.  Thus it is likely that one or both of them were enumerated in that census; but of course without knowing their names, they could be listed in plain sight and wouldn't even know it was them.  So my plan was to find out as much as possible out each of the 31 Fasts in that census to try to identify his parents.  I didn't identify either parent, but I was able to eliminate most of them as possible candidates.

I chose the 1776 census because it was only of Mennonites in West Prussia, so I didn't have to worry about sorting out people who had "Mennonite-sounding" names.  Glenn Penner has already identified quite a few people in it, so a good start has been made.  Finally, I have scans of all the originals for the 1776 census.  I decided against the 1772 census because it included everyone in West Prussia - not just the Mennonites.  Very little work has been done on it, and I have only about half the scans for "Mennonite" villages in the Gross Werder, and ordering them from the Geheimes Staatsarkhiv in Berlin is slow and expensive.

Glenn Penner's extraction of the 1776 census is found here.  He (and perhaps others) had already identified 11 of the 31 Fasts with Grandma (GM) numbers.  I added 10 more during my project, so 21 of the 31 are now identified in GM.

The results of my efforts can be downloaded from Google Drive.  A few comments about the spreadsheet - the names and dates that I added are in red.  On a few people, I just looked them up and found the family in GM, just waiting to have a GM number associated with them on the census spreadsheet.  Others took a lot more work to research.  And a few were not in GM at all.

I started by looking for the head of household in my giant spreadsheet of Fasts that I have extracted over the last few years.  Any time I looked at church book or microfilm, I put all the names of Fasts (and in-laws) into a giant spreadsheet - even if I wasn't interested in them at the time.  Now I could just look at it and see all the records, for example, for Claas Fast, even if they were scattered among different sources.  Many times a family would come together just like that.

The sources that I checked included

• Prussian Mennonite church books (Tiegenhagen, Ladekopp, Rosenort, Bärwalde, Montau, Tragheimerweide, Heubuden, Danzig, etc.) - I used the extractions at MennoniteGenealogy.com, Andreas Riesen's extractions, and the originals at Bethel College's Mennonite Library and Archives
• Lutheran/Evangelical church books (Jungfer, Fürstenau, Neuteich, etc.) - Mostly from LDS microfilms
• West Prussia Censuses - 1772, 1776, 1789, 1793 (Danzig), 1811 (Elbing)
• Russian Censuses - 1806, 1808, 1811, 1835
• Property Records 
• Emigration Records - BH Unruh, Peter Rempel, MennoniteGenealogy.com

The key to successful genealogical research in West Prussia is to combine all the sources.  There are lots of West Prussian records, but most of them are fragmented  - there are only a few Mennonite Familienbücher where the entire family is listed together and most of these are fairly late.  Most West Prussian records give one data point, e.g. a certain child was born on a certain date and his father was a certain man.  If you pull everything together, suddenly the whole family pops into view.

To handle all this data, you need several things:

• A method to store and organize all the data - such as my spreadsheet of Fast extractions
• Access to all the records - online, microfilm, orders from archives
• Research collateral lines - With fragmented data, researching siblings of your direct ancestor helps to pull everything together.

 I would encourage you to try the same thing for your surname.

 

Update on 1776 Census Project

I've been working on a project to identify all the Fasts in the 1776 census of Mennonites in West Prussia.  Glenn Penner's extraction of the data is found here.  My theory was that one or both of the parents of my earliest known Fast ancestor, Gerhard Fast #660202 (1739-1829) might be listed in that census, and I wouldn't even have known about it.  His oldest known sibling was born ABT 1737 - if his parents were about 20 years old when their first child was born, they might have been born about 1717.  Thus in 1776, they would have been about 60 years old.

There were 31 Fast families listed in the 1776 census, and 11 of them had previously been identified in Grandma.  I was able to identify 11 more Fasts, so now 22 of the 31 are identified in GM.

My methodology was to look for them first in GM.  Then I checked my spreadsheet in which I have extracted 431 individual records over the years from the Mennonite, Lutheran/Evangelical, and Catholic church books to see if I could find the person.  I checked the Mennonite church books that Andreas Riesen extracted.  I checked the 1772 and 1789 census, the immigration records to Russia in BH Unruh, Peter Rempel, and that I have gotten from the Prussian archives in Berlin, and the land records that Glenn Penner has posted online.

Unfortunately, none of the Fasts whom I was able to identify were old enough to be the parents of my Gerhard.  There are 3-4 Fasts whom I could not identify who lived in the Gross Werder and are potential candidates to be Gerhard's parents, but I found no information to identify them.  I was able to tie many, many children to the 22 identified Fast families, so I've added a lot to the store of knowledge about the Fasts in GM, so it's been a useful exercise.  But I didn't accomplish the goal that I set out to achieve.

I'm planning a trip to Poland in 1-2 years to do research in the archives there, and this work was a necessary prelude to that trip.  I wouldn't want to make an expensive trip to the Polish archives without having done everything that I could with data that is available to me while sitting at home.

I'll post the spreadsheet with my results in the near future, but I need to clean up the spreadsheet first.

Knocked Dolwn a Brick Wall! (Part I)

I've been stumped for two months now.  That's a long time to be unable to figure something out, especially when the answer is right in front of you.

When I started working on my 4-greats-grandfather Martin Fast #660209, I hardly knew anything about him.  Here is descendant chart that I had:

All the information that I had about him came from the marriage record of his son Isaac Martin Fast #51802 (b. ABT 1790), my 3-greats-grandfather, when he married in Reinland, West Prussia, in 1813.  And here is the marriage record:

Marriage record of Isaac Fast and Catharina Fast, 8 December 1813, Tiegenhagen Mennonite Church, West Prussia, Kirchen-Buch, 1780-1831, p. 102.  Accessed at http://mla.bethelks.edu, Congregation #314, on 14 October 2012.

From the record in the Tiegenhagen church book, you can see that Isaac Fast was the son of Martin Fast, who was from Schlobitten.  The village of Schlobitten was not in Glenn Penner's list of Mennonite villages in West Prussia, so I searched for it at Kartenmeister, which is an incredible list of villages in East and West Prussia.  It turned out to be a village in East Prussia.  I searched the online records from East Prussia, but I couldn't find Martin Fast.  That was five years ago, and I didn't know what else to do, so I just left it.

A couple months ago, I thought I should take another look at the records to see what I could find.  That will be Part II.

New Approach to West Prussian Censuses

At least it's a new approach for me - maybe it's old hat for a lot of you.  But I thought I would share it in case you haven't ever used it before.

I have a brick wall in the person of my five-greats-grandfather, Gerhard Fast #660202 (1739-1828).  It's going to be a tough one to break through that will probably require finding new record sets.  But before I embark on the expense of archival research to find more record sets, I thought I should organize the information about the earliest Fasts that is available in the area where he lived, the Gross Werder in West Prussia.

I even realized that Gerhard's father or mother might be mentioned in the 1772 or 1776 censuses - but if they are, I wouldn't recognize them because I don't know their names.  Since Gerhard's oldest known sibling was born ABT 1737, his parents might have been born about 1715, which would make them about 60 years old in those two censuses.  So it would be quite possible for one or both of them to be listed there.

I started with the 1776 census for three reasons:  1) Glenn Penner had already extracted the data, so it was easy to work with, 2) it was specifically of Mennonites, and 3) I had copied all the pages of the census from LDS microfilm #105655, so I can check the original.

Source:  1776 Special Consignation of Mennonite families, West Prussia, II. HA, Abt. 9, Materien, Tit. CIX, Nr. 1, Vol. 1, p. 17-125, Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, Germany.  Accessed on FHL film #1056552. 

I have worked through five of the thirty-one Fasts in the census, and I have made a lot of connections with their children who were in Grandma. 

Abraham Fast might be #1350958
Anthon Fast #932518 (1732-1782)
Claas Fast #706529 (1745-1820)
Cornelius Fast #932218 (ABT 1722-1807)
Gerhard Fast #660202 (1739-1828) my ancestor
Jacob Fast #531527 (ABT 1752-1808)


None of them solved my brick wall, but they are all someone's brick wall.  Since Mennonites lived in clusters, I highly recommend this technique for whatever region you are stuck.  Try to piece together the families of the other people with the same surname living in the same Mennonite cluster - there is a good chance you will find relatives there.

I'll post more on specific results from this project as I go along, but I wanted to get some preliminary results posted here to motivate others to do the same.