Nikolaus Riebel, a farmer, his wife Anna, and children (Philipp, age 13; Anna, age 8; Kossman, age 6; Daniel, age 2½) arrived from Lübeck at the port of Oranienbaum on 18 June 1766 aboard the hooker Anna Catharina under the Skipper Adolph Scharpenberg.
They settled in the Volga German colony of Keller on 12 May 1767 and are recorded there on the 1767 census in Household No. 3.
Following the destruction of Keller, surviving members of the family resettled to the colony of Neu-Kolonie where son Philipp is recorded on the 1798 census in Household No. Nk26.
The 1767 census records that Nikolaus Riebel came from the German village of Bettenhausen in the Kurmainz region. [The Bettenhausen that is linked here is located in Kreis Kusel which is in the historical region of Kurmainz. But there are other villages by this name, and this one has not been independently verified as the one from which Nikolaus Riebel came.]
- 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): Nk26.
- Pleve, Igor. Einwanderung in das Wolgagebiet, 1764-1767 Band 2 (Göttingen: Der Göttinger Arbeitskreis, 2001): 342.
- Pleve, Igor. Lists of Colonists to Russia in 1766: Reports by Ivan Kulberg (Saratov: Saratov State Technical University, 2010): #893.
Brent Mai