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

[Delores Stevens]

 Jerry
I don't have any experience with historical data on demographics, but
judging from what I see in my family background it would make sense if there
were 10 homes and 154 germans per village.  I have family members with 12
children, plus 2 adults makes 14 people in one household.  I have no reason
to believe that other households weren't just as prolific.  This may make
sense.  Also that would mean that most villages would consist of about 40
adults and the rest would be children.  This would not include elderly
grandparents or unmarried adults living in the same household.  Just to add
to the discussion.
Delores
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jerry Frank" <jkfrank at shaw.ca>
To: <>
Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2003 7:59 AM
Subject: [Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Musings about population demographics in
Volhynia


> 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
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