Martin Schneider, a farmer, his wife Anna, and [step-]son Elias [Riel] (age 10¼), arrived from Lübeck at the port of Oranienbaum on 19 July 1766 aboard a ship named Die Zwei Gebrüder (The Two Brothers) under the command of Skipper Nikolaus Pink.
Martin Schneider, his wife Catharina, and [step-]son Elias [Riel] (age 10¼) are recorded on the list of colonists being transported from St. Petersburg to Saratov in 1767 along with a note that Catharina died in route.
They settled in the Volga German colony of Orlovskaya on 3 August 1767. Elias Riel is recorded on the 1767 census of Orlovskaya in Household No. 10 along with his stepfather [his mother died before the 1767 census].
In 1785, Elias Riel moved from Orlovskaya to Paulskaya.
The 1767 census records that Johann Martin Schneider came from the German village of Stemag [?] in the Sachsen (Saxony) region. Elias Riel may have been from this region as well.
- 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): 558.
- 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): Pl35, Mv2159.
- Pleve, Igor. Einwanderung in das Wolgagebiet, 1764-1767 Band 3 (Göttingen: Der Göttinger Arbeitskreis, 2005): 313.
- Pleve, Igor. Lists of Colonists to Russia in 1766: Reports by Ivan Kulberg (Saratov: Saratov State Technical University, 2010): #4373.
Brent Mai