[Johann] Valentin Knopf and his wife Margaretha arrived from Lübeck via Reval [Estonia] at the port of Oranienbaum on 27 May 1766 aboard a pinque named Слон (Slon - Elephant in Russian) under the command of Lieutenant Sergey Panov.
He settled in the Volga German colony of Preuss on 16 August 1767 and is recorded there on the 1767 census in Household No. 128.
The Oranienbaum passenger list records that Valentin Knopf was a physician (Feldsher) from the German region of the Pfalz. The 1776 census records that he was a tailor (Schneider) from the German village of Greuth in the Bamberg region.
[It is questionable whether these two records refer to the same individual.]
- 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): 113.
- 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): Ps77.
- Pleve, Igor. Einwanderung in das Wolgagebiet, 1764-1767 Band 3 (Göttingen: Der Göttinger Arbeitskreis, 2005): 437.
- Pleve, Igor. Lists of Colonists to Russia in 1766: Reports by Ivan Kulberg (Saratov: Saratov State Technical University, 2010): #608.
Brent Mai