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Engels Archive

Engels Archives
photo taken by Ken Stugart, summer 2000


The Engels archives is housed in a converted granary of German heritage, the walls are at least 2 feet thick, including the interior walls. The floors were added for the archive's and are very well done, but the storage of the materials are the same as Saratov's, very clean and shiny floors, well organized and cataloged.

A new website for the Engels archives includes English, German and Russian versions recently become available.

Elizabeth M. Yerina, Director of a branch of the State Archive of Saratov Oblast, located in Engels, Russia spoke at the AHSGR convention in June 1998 at Wichita, KS. The complete transcripts of her presentation can be found in the AHSGR Journal, Spring 1999, translated by Richard Rye. The following are key excerpts from her talk:
There are preserved in the archive 45 collections of Evangelical-Lutheran and 21 Roman Catholic churches. According to foreign sources, almost 75 percent of the settlers arriving in the Volga region were Lutherans. As it was stated above, while these documents are not complete, analyses has shown that the archive holds 419 books of births, baptisms, marriages and deaths of citizens. Most of these have been preserved since 1800. They augment well the personnel books, which have no less significance than the parish registers, and they are used by workers in the archive in the fulfillment of requests of a genealogical character.

Most complete are the documents of the Evangelical-Lutheran churches of the villages of Goly Karamysh (Balzer) for 1804-1919, Gololobovka (Donhof) for 1815- 1905, Katharinenstadt (Marxstadt) for 1763-1916, Norka for 1833-1915, Privalnoye (Warenburg) for 1794-1916. This parish also included Tarlyk (Laub) and Skatovka (Straub), as well as Sevastyanovka (Anton) for 1764-1892, and Ust-Zolikha (Messer) for 1791-1912.

In May of 2004 the archives closed for a year or two. A major addition is being built to enlarge the current archives building.


old book in Engels archives bookshelf of old books in Engels archives
photos of Engels archives taken by Ken Stugart summer 2000

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