Michael Stenzel, a carpenter, his wife Anna, and [step-]son Philipp [surname not recorded] (age 10¼) arrived from Lübeck at the port of Oranienbaum on 18 July 1766 aboard a Russian packet-boat named Svyataya Ekaterina (St. Catherine) under the command of Midshipman Alexander Trusov.
They settled in the Volga German colony of Dietel on 1 July 1767 and are recorded there on the 1767 census in Household No. 4.
In 1789, widow Katharina Stenzel and her family moved from Dietel to Holstein.
The Oranienbaum passenger list records that Michael Stenzel came from the German region of Alsace. The 1767 census records that he came from the German village of Westhoffen in the Alsace region.
There are no known surviving male lines of this Stenzel family among the Volga German colonies.
- 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): 332.
- 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): Mv0395.
- Pleve, Igor. Einwanderung in das Wolgagebiet, 1764-1767 Band 1 (Göttingen: Der Göttinger Arbeitskreis, 1999): 281.
- Pleve, Igor. Lists of Colonists to Russia in 1766: Reports by Ivan Kulberg (Saratov: Saratov State Technical University, 2010): #2459.
Brent Mai