Jost Erdmann, his wife Anna, and children (Elisabeth, age 15¼; Johann Daniel, age 11; Katharina, age 7; Johannes, age 4) arrived from Lübeck at the port in Oranienbaum on 17 July 1766 aboard a pink named Lev (Lion) under the command of Lieutenant Fyodor Fyodorov.
They settled in the Volga German colony of Grimm and are recorded there on the 1767 census in Household No. 1.
The Jost Erdmann family is recorded on the 1775 census of Grimm in Household No. 16.
Johann Jakob Erdmann and his family are recorded on the 1857 census of Grimm in Household No. 28 along with a note that they relocated to the daughter colony of Rosenberg in 1852.
The Oranienbaum passenger list records that Jost Erdmann was a farmer while the 1767 census records that he was a craftsman (Handwerker). Both documents record that Jost Erdmann came from the German district of Darmstadt.
- 1775 Grimm Census (Household No. 16).
- 1857 Grimm Census (Household No. 28).
- 1857 Rosenberg Census.
- Idt, Andreas and Georg Rauschenbach. Auswanderung deutscher Kolonisten nach Russland im Jahre 1766 (Moscow: Idt & Rauschenbach, 2019): 31.
- Idt, Andreas and Georg Rauschenbach. Deutsche Kolonisten im Jahr 1766 in Oranienbaum und in den Siedlungsorten: Die Kuhlberg-Listen (Moscow: Idt & Rauschenbach, 2024): 321.
- Mai, Brent Alan. 1798 Census of the German Colonies along the Volga: Economy, Population, and Agriculture (Lincoln, NE: American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, 1999): Gm092, Gm118, Gm161.
- Pleve, Igor. Einwanderung in das Wolgagebiet, 1764-1767 Band 2 (Göttingen: Der Göttinger Arbeitskreis, 2001): 73.
- Pleve, Igor. Lists of Colonists to Russia in 1766: Reports by Ivan Kulberg (Saratov: Saratov State Technical University, 2010): #2376.
Brent Mai