[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Musings about population demographics in Volhynia

[Jerry Frank]

Are there any readers who have experience with historical population 
demographics / statistics?

According to several sources (each in turn may in fact rely on one single 
original source), there were about 200,000 non-Jewish Germans living in 
Volhynia in the year 1900.  My current map represents about 1,300 Germanic 
villages in Volhynia.  That means an average of 154 Germans per 
village.  From historical maps we know that many of these villages only had 
5 or 10 homes in them so such an average population seems too high to 
me.  Certainly we may find more villages to add to the list but the numbers 
won't be large.  Even if we find 100 more villages, the average only drops 
to 143.

Some other things we know:

1.  There are about 72,000 line entries for Lutheran records covering the 
years 1835-1885.  This includes all births, deaths, and marriages.  It does 
not include the minority population of German Baptists, Moravian Brethern, 
and Mennonites who would not be recorded in those records.

2.  Of those line entries, there are about 22,700 Lutheran births and 9000 
deaths recorded for the years 1880, 81, 82, 83 and 85.  (the 1884 book is 
missing).  If we extrapolate that up to the year 1900 at the same rate, the 
population gain from 1881 to 1900 would be somewhere in the vicinity of 
55,000 not counting the impact of any in or out migration.

3.  Thousands of Germans began to leave Volhynia for the Americas in about 
1888 - most in the 1890s.  At the same time there was still some inward 
migration from East Prussia, the Baltic States, and the Lublin / Chelm region.

So - is it possible to interpret this data to get us up to the claim of 
200,000 Germans in Volhynia by 1900?  If so, how do we explain the small 
village sizes?  Were there large numbers of Germans living in the cities 
that we are not aware of - perhaps of the Catholic faith?  In almost 20 
years of research in Volhynia, I think I have encountered only one query 
about a Catholic German in Volhynia so that seems unlikely.




Jerry Frank - Calgary, Alberta
jkfrank at shaw.ca