Christoph [sic] Ritzmann & Margaretha Schack were married on 2 June 1766 in Roßlau.
Christian [sic] Ritzmann, an armourer (Waffenschmied), his wife Margaretha, and daughter Margaretha Regina (age ½) arrived from Lübeck at the port of Oranienbaum on 21 July 1766 aboard a snow-brig named Mercurius under the command of Skipper Christian Heinrich Abelßen.
They settled in the Volga German colony of Jost on 16 August 1767 and are recorded there on the 1767 census in Household No. 44.
The Oranienbaum passenger list records that Christian Ritzmann came from the German region of Hessen. The 1767 census records that Christoph [sic] Ritzmann came from the German village of Ritenbach in the Hessen-Kassel region.
There are no known surviving male lines of this Ritzmann family among the Volga German colonies.
- Idt, Andreas and Georg Rauschenbach. Auswanderung deutscher Kolonisten nach Russland im Jahre 1766 (Moscow: Idt & Rauschenbach, 2019): 32.
- Idt, Andreas and Georg Rauschenbach. Deutsche Kolonisten im Jahr 1766 in Oranienbaum und in den Siedlungsorten: Die Kuhlberg-Listen (Moscow: Idt & Rauschenbach, 2024): 421.
- 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): Jo47.
- Mai, Brent Alan and Dona Reeves-Marquardt, German Migration to the Russian Volga (1764-1767) (Lincoln, NE: American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, 2003): #1000.
- Pleve, Igor. Einwanderung in das Wolgagebiet, 1764-1767 Band 2 (Göttingen: Der Göttinger Arbeitskreis, 2001): 205.
- Pleve, Igor. Lists of Colonists to Russia in 1766: Reports by Ivan Kulberg (Saratov: Saratov State Technical University, 2010): #3281.
Brent Mai