Recently I was lucky enough to find the passenger list for
the SS Belgenland which sailed from Antwerp, Belgium, to New York City,
arriving on January 3, 1881. The names
of Benjamin Ratzlaff’s widow, Eva, and her 7 children, are easy to make
out. Immediately following the Ratzlaffs
are families with typical Volhynian Mennonite names, listing no fathers: the
widow Maria Köhn, age 44, with 5 children; the widow Anna Koehn, age 43,
with perhaps her sister and 2 children; Magdalene Koehn, age 63, with 2
children; and Caroline Schmidt, age 39, with 3 children. Also listed is the Jacob Ratzlaff
Family; Jacob, age 43, with his wife Eva, age 44, and 4 children.
So are these the six families who traveled together from
Volhynia and became stranded in Turkey?
Only one husband, a Jacob Ratzlaff, is listed. The other five families, as Minnie Unruh
indicated, were led by widows – the husbands having died of disease in Turkey.
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| Names from the SS Belgenland; Antwerp-New York; 1881 |
Presumably these families were bound for central
Kansas. Benjamin Ratzlaff’s widow, Eva
(Schmidt) Ratzlaff, is buried in Halstead, Kansas. However, I cannot identify any of these other
five families at this time.
