Adam Meess, a farmer, his wife Anna, sons (Adam, age 3; Franz, age ½), and sister-in-law Anna [surname not recorded] (age 36) arrived from Lübeck at the port of Oranienbaum on 2 August 1766 aboard an English frigate named Love & Unity under the command of Skipper Thomas Fairfax.
Joh. Adam Meess and Ana Marg. Wiessmann [presumed to be the sister-in-law] are recorded on a list of colonists being transported from St. Petersburg to Saratov in 1767.
It is not known in which colony they settled.
The Oranienbaum passenger list records that Adam Meess came from the German region of Erbach.
There are no known surviving male lines of this Meess family among the Volga German colonies.
- Idt, Andreas and Georg Rauschenbach. Auswanderung deutscher Kolonisten nach Russland im Jahre 1766 (Moscow: Idt & Rauschenbach, 2019): 33.
- Idt, Andreas and Georg Rauschenbach. Deutsche Kolonisten im Jahr 1766 in Oranienbaum und in den Siedlungsorten: Die Kuhlberg-Listen (Moscow: Idt & Rauschenbach, 2024): 672.
- Pleve, Igor. Lists of Colonists to Russia in 1766: Reports by Ivan Kulberg (Saratov: Saratov State Technical University, 2010): #5341.
- Rauschenbach, Georg. Deutsche Kolonisten auf dem Weg von St. Petersburg nach Saratow: Transportlisten von 1766-1767 (Moscow: G.V. Rauschenbach, 2017): #2997-2998.
Brent Mai