[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Ship Manifest Emil Schmidt Help With Location

[godivademaus at gmail.com]

Jerry:

I am reasonably certain that I am able to clear up your confusion with regard to the travelers on the ship’s manifest as I have located a family member traveling with them.


My family members are: Kunigunde Mielke and her brothers, Otto and Heinrich


Emil Schmidt and Emile Schmidt were listed as the children’s Aunt and Uncle.


This makes sense because I believe the mother, Anna Mielke arrived before the children, I have been unable to confirm if her husband, Henry made the trip and if so, did he survive, because a short time after the children arrived, Anna remarried.


The names of the places are difficult. What you have is a region that at that time was considered to be part of Russia (though they identified as ethnic Germans) with country and Duchy boundaries changing on a nearly continual basis. Alas Kunigunde has long since passed as has her progeny -- the only remaining relative was shocked when I presented them with this data (as I guess they always assumed their grand-mother was from Germany, not an ethnic German living in Russia). At any rate, the names of places changed from Russian names (Cyrrilic) to German names, to Slavic names again. Near as I can determine these names plot somewhere southeast of Warsaw… but some of the towns and villages were quite literally destroyed never to rise again after WWII.


I am a direct line descendent of Anna Mielke nee Anna Drews, sister to Emile Schmidt nee Drews.

I have a friend who is working at the Holocaust Museum trying to track down sites and names and since she does speak Slavic (and these names look like they could be Cyrillic or Slavic names that might have changed when the area became Poland), she may be able to give me a certain amount of insight into just where these places are.


Lauren Gessler

Shelton, WA

godivademaus at gmail.com