Christian Rühl & Anna Dorothea Grün were married on 16 March 1766 in St. Mary's Lutheran Church of Büdingen.
Christian Riel, a farmer, his wife Anna, and his mother-in-law Katharina [surname not recorded] 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 where they are recorded on the 1767 census in Household No. 72.
The Oranienbaum passenger list records that Christian Riel came from the German region of Solms. The 1767 census records that Christian Riel came from the German village of Retes in the Braunfels region.
- 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): 257.
- 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): Db07.
- 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): #438.
- Pleve, Igor. Einwanderung in das Wolgagebiet, 1764-1767 Band 1 (Göttingen: Der Göttinger Arbeitskreis, 1999): 333.
Brent Mai