Grandma Burr's brothers: Gottfried and Friedrich Bamesberger, 1896
Until she died in 1967, my husband's Grandma Marie Burr occasionally shared old photos of her handsome brothers in their Russian uniforms. She described her anguish at their disappearance around 1913 and the hard times she experienced as a young mother in Russia (now Ukraine). She recalled the tensions of the early 1900s -- how the Russians took their land, dissolved their German community of Klein Neudorf, and sent her brothers to the salt mines with life sentences.
In the early 1800s, Russia promised hundreds of German immigrants free farmland, autonomy, and no compulsory military service. However, several generations later, after the 1905 Russian revolution, updated policies displaced thousands of families like the Burrs and Bamesbergers. In a heavy accent, Grandma Burr ended her stories of life in southern Russia with a warning: "Never trust Russia!"
Marie was pregnant when she migrated to the United States in 1913, debarking on a ship from Hamburg, Germany. Accompanying her were her husband Michael and six children--a seventh deceased child remained behind in a grave. Six more children were born in Cheyenne County, Kansas, including my father-in-law Albert and her last child, a son who died in infancy. Marie was a widow in February 1925, when she buried the infant on a wind-swept hill in a cemetery next to the Salem Lutheran Church. Michael had died four months earlier.
Twenty years before the Burrs arrived, my Zimbelman ancestors, with four sons and three daughters, emigrated from Rohrbach, Russia/Ukraine. Michael and Katherina had buried seven children on Russian soil and moved before their oldest son turned 21, the age for conscription into the Russian army. The Zimbelmans settled in Cheyenne County in 1893-- each son eventually cultivating substantial farmland with Russian wheat seeds.
I am grateful for the sacrifices our ancestors, immigrants from a hostile land that is once again filled with people suffering from Russian aggression.
I pray . . .
--for peace in
Ukraine, home of our ancestors, Michael and Marie Bamesberger and Michael and
Katherina Zimbelman,
-- for all displaced persons who have emigrated from violent homelands,
-- for compassionate government immigration policies because through our ancestors “we were
once strangers in a strange land.”
(Leviticus 19:34)
--Gratefully submitted by CD Burr
