Johann Wilhelm Opper [sic] & Eleonore Weitzel were married on 14 March 1766 in St. Mary's Lutheran Church of Büdingen. [See Weitzel Family.]
Wilhelm Opfer, a farmer, his wife Rosina, and his mother Anna arrived from Lübeck at the port of Oranienbaum on 9 June 1766 aboard an English frigate named Love & Unity under the command of Skipper Thomas Fairfax.
They settled in the Volga German colony of Dobrinka on 20 June 1767 and are recorded there on the 1767 census in Household No. 71.
The Oranienbaum passenger list records that Wilhelm Opfer came from the German region of Darmstadt. The 1767 census records that Wilhelm Opfer came from the German village of Belterstein [Beltershain] in the Darmstadt region which has been determined to be Beltershain located just west of Stangenrod which is from where the Weitzel family came.
- Idt, Andreas and Georg Rauschenbach. Auswanderung deutscher Kolonisten nach Russland im Jahre 1766 (Moscow: Idt & Rauschenbach, 2019): 29.
- Idt, Andreas and Georg Rauschenbach. Deutsche Kolonisten im Jahr 1766 in Oranienbaum und in den Siedlungsorten: Die Kuhlberg-Listen (Moscow: Idt & Rauschenbach, 2024): 256.
- 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): Db04.
- Mai, Brent Alan and Dona Reeves-Marquardt, German Migration to the Russian Volga (1764-1767) (Lincoln, NE: American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, 2003): #430.
- Parish register of Büdingen.
- Pleve, Igor. Einwanderung in das Wolgagebiet, 1764-1767 Band 1 (Göttingen: Der Göttinger Arbeitskreis, 1999): 332.
- Pleve, Igor. Lists of Colonists to Russia in 1766: Reports by Ivan Kulberg (Saratov: Saratov State Technical University, 2010): #1844.
Brent Mai