Philipp Kess, a farmer, her wife Anna Maria, and daughter Maria Christina (age ¼) arrived from Lübeck at the port of Oranienbaum on 19 July 1766 aboard a pinque named Slon (Elephant) under the command of Lieutenant Sergey Panov.
Christina Kniss [sic] (age 1½), daughter of the deceased Philipp Kniss [sic], is recorded on the 1767 census of Huck in Household No. 18 along with her stepfather Lorenz Köhler.
Christina Roth née Kess and her family are recorded on the 1798 census of Huck in Household No. Hk59.
The Oranienbaum passenger list records that Philipp Kess came from the German region of Pfalz.
There are no known surviving male lines of this Kniss 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): 518.
- 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): Hk59.
- Pleve, Igor. Einwanderung in das Wolgagebiet, 1764-1767 Band 2 (Göttingen: Der Göttinger Arbeitskreis, 2001): 144.
- Pleve, Igor. Lists of Colonists to Russia in 1766: Reports by Ivan Kulberg (Saratov: Saratov State Technical University, 2010): #4072.
Brent Mai