Mennonite Deaths Reported to the Chortitza Village Soviet: 1925 – 1928

By Glenn H. Penner (gpenner@uoguelph.ca) and Nikolai Penner

Over the past few years the Mormons have been microfilming selected records from archives of the former Soviet Union. Several of these films contain Mennonite material. One such film is LDS #2392944 (item#5) which is supposed to contain deaths for Chortitza for 1921 to 1928. In fact some years contain death certificates for other areas and do not contain Mennonite deaths at all. The death certificates registered at the Chortitza village soviet are identified according to “nationality”. Mennonites appear to be grouped with Germans. I have been able to identify 52 certificates which are likely for Mennonites. For some family names it is difficult to distinguish between Mennonites and Germans. It should be pointed out that just because the deaths were reported to the Chortitza office does not mean the deceased died in the village of Chortitza. There is evidence from other sources indicating that some of these people died in other villages, such as Rosenthal.

All certificates labelled as German were scanned by me (Glenn Penner) and translated by Nikolai Penner. I then removed those “Germans” with family names that were obviously not traditionally Mennonite. In some cases entries in the certificates were not readable and were not translated. If anyone wishes to have a copy of a particular scan of the original Russian certificate please contact me at the email above. Please send any comments or corrections directly to me.

An index with links to the translated certificates is provided below. I have provided standardized Mennonite family names in the index as well as the closest contemporary first names. The comments are mine and there are a few translation comments by Nikolai at the end of the certificates.

Page created 9 April 2009; HTML by Richard D. Thiessen

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