Widower Jakob Pfeifer, a farmer, and his sons (Joackel, age 19; Bassel, age 17¼) arrived from Lübeck at the port of Oranienbaum on 11 June 1766 aboard a snow-brig named Der Jäger (The Hunter) under the command of Skipper Gabriel Will along with Mauritius Pfeifer, a farmer, and his wife Dorothea. The relationship between these two Pfeifer families, while traveling together, is not recorded.
Joachim Pfeiffer and the widow Dorothea Pfeiffer are recorded on a list of colonists being transported from St. Petersburg to Saratov in 1767.
Jakob [Joackel] Pfeifer (age 20), a farmer, and his wife Margaretha (age 19) are recorded on the 1767 census of Seelmann in Household No. 32. They had arrived in Seelmann on 15 July 1767.
The 1767 census records that the Pfeifer family came from the German village of Wiersdorf in the Kurmainz region. There is not a Wiersdorf located in an area that was part of the Electorate of Mainz (German: Kurmainz). There is a village called Wiersdorf in a region that was part of the Electorate of Trier (German: Kurtrier) that is today in Kreis Bitburg-Prüm, a district from which a number of Volga German families came.
There are no known surviving male lines of this Pfeifer family among the Volga German colonies.
- Idt, Andreas and Georg Rauschenbach. Auswanderung deutscher Kolonisten nach Russland im Jahre 1766 (Moscow: Idt & Rauschenbach, 2019): 30.
- Idt, Andreas and Georg Rauschenbach. Deutsche Kolonisten im Jahr 1766 in Oranienbaum und in den Siedlungsorten: Die Kuhlberg-Listen (Moscow: Idt & Rauschenbach, 2024): 295.
- Pleve, Igor. Einwanderung in das Wolgagebiet, 1764-1767 Band 4 (Göttingen: Der Göttinger Arbeitskreis, 2008): 155.
- Pleve, Igor. Lists of Colonists to Russia in 1766: Reports by Ivan Kulberg (Saratov: Saratov State Technical University, 2010): #2157, #2158.
- Rauschenbach, Georg. Deutsche Kolonisten auf dem Weg von St. Petersburg nach Saratow: Transportlisten von 1766-1767 (Moscow: G.V. Rauschenbach, 2017): #1565, #1566.
Brent Mai