Christoph Ahrens, a single farmer, 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 Nicolaus Peter Pinck.
Christoph Arens [sic] is recorded on a list of colonists being transported from St. Petersburg to Saratov in 1767.
Christoph Arnst [sic], a farmer, and his [new] wife Elisabeth settled in the Volga German colony of Boisroux on 3 August 1767. They are recorded there on the 1767 census in Household No. 81 along with 5 stepchildren with the surname Luder (Johann Detlof, age 18; Karl, age 15; Sophia, age 10; Karl Ludwig, age 8; Joachim, age 5). [See Luder Family.]
The 1767 census records that Christoph Arnst came from the German village of Gonna in the Mecklenburg region.
There are no known surviving male lines of this Arnst 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): 552.
- Mai, Brent Alan. 1798 Census of the German Colonies along the Volga (Lincoln, NE: American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, 1999): Bx10.
- Pleve, Igor. Einwanderung in das Wolgagebiet 1764-1767 Band 1 (Göttingen: Der Göttinger Arbeitskreis, 1999): 159.
Brent Mai