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.
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:
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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.
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