Thursday, April 12, 2012

Leeleva, Volhynia

My grandfather, Albert Ratzlaff, son of Andreas Ratzlaff (b.1869) was in possession of a hand-drawn map of Leeleva.  The geographic details of this map are all correct, although they're not all in the right places.  Also, the chronology of this map is off just a little.  Some of the inhabitants that are listed left the village in 1874 while Andreas, who's listed as living toward the bottom left, certainly didn't have his own home by that time since he was only born in 1869.


After the Mennonites left in 1874, some of the villages were inhabited by Lutheran Germans.  A descendant of one of the later inhabitants provided me with this map, which shows Leeleva at a slightly later date than the map above.  Based on the locations of the cemetaries, I also think this map shows a portion of Leeleva slightly to the east of the map above:


Here's a close up shot of Leeleva as shown on the Polish Army map from the 1920s.  Note the location of the two cemetaries in Leeleva (Lesna) (marked as Cm on the map).  Was the more northerly the Mennonite cemetary while the southern one was Lutheran?  Based on the geography of the hand-drawn maps above, I feel this could be the case:


Finally, here's a hand-drawn map of Karolswalde c.1900, taken from the Karlswalde web pages (http://home.arcor.de/pulin/karlswalde/maps_ph1.htm).  Like the other hand-drawn maps, the geography may be a bit off here, because it was drawn by a person remembering the village from decades ago.  The details are probably all fairly correct, but may be in the wrong places.

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