[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Introduction: Searching for info on surname FLATT from Marianowka

[Gary Warner]

Stacy,

You need to contact our member William Matchinski and his wife 
Christine.   Lydia Matchinski, the wife of Adolf Flatt, is his grandaunt.

I will send you a separate email with his email address.

Gary

On 4/15/2010 9:24 AM, Stacy Flatt wrote:
> Hello,
>
> My name is Stacy and I'm researching my father's family history,
> specifically the surname FLATT.  This is what I know from family
> stories:
>
> Catherine the Great invited Germans to settled Russia, so my ancestors
> did.  They lived as farmers in an area not far from Lviv.  It may have
> been Russia, Poland, Germany, or Ukraine, or any combination of those
> at the times my ancestors lived there.  Things got bad and in the
> early 1900s, my great grandparents moved to the United States where
> the settled in the UP of Michigan, near other friends and family
> members.  They had many children, and the children grew up speaking
> Low German as their first language.  They learned English in school.
> They were Lutheran.
>
> This is what I'm able to document:
>
> Adolph and Lydia Flatt came to the US through Ellis Island in 1905.
> Their names are sometimes spelled Adolf and Flat.  They are Flat on
> the Ellis Island site.  Their previous home is listed as what I can
> best read as Marianowka Crest in Russia.  In the 1930 census records,
> their previous country is listed as Poland (NOT Russia, which
> indicates to me that their town was affected by the Poland/Russia
> border changes happening in the early half of the century).
>
> There are no parents listed and though I can find other Flatts in
> other people's genealogies, I cannot connect them to these two since
> I'm missing so much information.  I want to try looking at village
> records for where they lived, but Marianowka Crest does not seem to
> exist.
>
> However, there is a Marjanowka Kreis Luck that I've seen reference
> too.  I wonder if this could be it?  It doesn't seem far from Lviv,
> seems like it was a Lutheran community, and the Kreis could sound like
> Crest.  It also looks like it could have been in Russia in 1905 but
> Poland in 1930.  It is now in Ukraine.
>
> My questions: Does this sound like a reasonable theory?  What does the
> Kreis Luck designate?  Where can I access records for Marjanowka Kreis
> Luck?  Has anyone else done research on the FLATT surname and what
> have you found?  Has anyone else researched the Russian Germans in the
> Upper Peninsula of Michigan?  (FLATT, SEIB, MATSCHENSKI, SCHMIDT,
> etc?)
>
> Thanks!
> Stacy
>
>