5 Generations of Weber's

5 Generations of Weber's

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Johann Casper Weber:  

Born 11-25-1888 in Krasnoyar, Samara, Volga Russia

died 11-08-1929 in Chicago, Cook county, Illinois

Johann C. Weber 1888-1929

Frederick Weber:
Born 4-14-1923 in  Chicago, Cook co, Illinois

Died 7-21-1962 in Chicago, Cook co, Illinois

Frederick Weber 1923-1962

Frederick J. Weber:
Born 5-27-1952 in Chicago, Cook county, Illinois

Frederick J. Weber

Frederick J. Weber, Jr.:
Born 6-15-1981 in Janesville, Rock county, Wisconsin

Frederick J. Jr. and Trinity Weber

Kenderick Matthew Weber:
Born 11-15-2008 in Carbondale, Jackson county, Illinois

Kenderick M. Weber

Volga Germans (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Main article: Volga Germans

Tsarina Catherine II was a German, born in Stettin now Szczecin in Poland. She proclaimed open immigration for foreigners wishing to live in the Russian Empire on July 22, 1763, marking the beginning of a much larger presence for Germans in the Empire. German colonies in the lower Volga river area were founded almost immediately afterward. These early colonies were attacked during the Pugachev uprising, which was centred on the Volga area, but they survived the rebellion.

German immigration was motivated in part by religious intolerance and warfare in central Europe as well as by frequently difficult economic conditions. Catherine II's declaration freed German immigrants from military service (imposed on native Russians) and from most taxes. It placed the new arrivals outside of Russia's feudal hierarchy and granted them considerable internal autonomy. Moving to Russia gave German immigrants political rights that they would not have possessed in their own lands. Religious minorities found these terms very agreeable, particularly Mennonites from the Vistula River valley. Their unwillingness to participate in military service, and their long tradition of dissent from mainstreamLutheranism and Calvinism, made life under the Prussians very difficult for them. Nearly all of the Prussian Mennonites emigrated to Russia over the following century, leaving no more than a handful in Prussia.

Other German minority churches took advantage of Catherine II's offer as well, particularly Evangelical Christians like the Baptists. Although Catherine's declaration forbade them from proselytising among members of the Orthodox church, they were free to evangelize Russia's Muslim and other non-Christian minorities.

German colonization was most intense in the lower Volga, but other areas were targeted as well. The area around the Black Sea received many German immigrants, and the lower Dniepr river area, around Ekaterinaslav (now Dnepropetrovsk) and Aleksandrovsk (now Zaporizhzhia), was favoured by the Mennonites.

In 1803, Catherine II’s grandson, Tsar Alexander I, reissued her proclamation. In the chaos of the Napoleonic wars, the response from Germans was enormous. Ultimately, the Tsar imposed minimum financial requirements on new immigrants, requiring them to either have 300 gulden in cash or special skills in order to come to Russia.

The abolition of serfdom in 1863 created a shortage of labour in agriculture and motivated new German immigration, particularly from increasingly crowded central European states, where there was no longer enough fertile land for full employment in agriculture.

Furthermore, a sizable part of Russia's ethnic Germans migrated into Russia from its Polish possessions. The partitions of Poland in the late 18th century dismantled the Polish state, dividing it between Austria, Prussia and Russia. There were already many Germans living in the part of Poland transferred to Russia, dating back to medieval and later migrations. Many Germans in Congress Poland migrated further east into Russia between then and World War I, particularly in the aftermath of the Polish insurrection of 1830. The Polish insurrection in 1863 added a new wave of German emigration from Poland to those who had already moved east, and led to the founding of extensive German colonies in Volhynia. When Poland reclaimed its independence after World War I, it ceased to be a source of German emigration to Russia, but by then many hundreds of thousands of Germans had already settled in enclaves across the Russian Empire.

Germans settled in the Caucasus area from the beginning of the 19th century and in the 1850s expanded into the Crimea. In the 1890s, new German colonies opened in the Altay mountain area in Russian Asia (see Mennonite settlements of Altai). German colonial areas were still expanding in Ukraine as late as the beginning of World War I.

According to the first Census of the Russian Empire in 1897, there were about 1.8 million respondents who reported German as their mother tongue.