Schaaf (Urbach)*
Gottlieb Schaff, a single man, arrived from Lübeck at the port of Oranienbaum on 21 July 1766 aboard the snow-brig Mercurius under the command of Skipper Christian Heinrich Abelßen.
He settled in the Volga German colony of Urbach [where his name is recorded as Gottfried] on 13 July 1767 and is recorded there on the 1767 census in Household No. 15 along with his new wife Maria Katharina and her daughter Katharina Wengert.
The 1767 Oranienbaum passenger list records that he was a weaver from Sachsen (Saxony) while the 1767 census records that he was a craftsman (Handwerker) from the German village of Luckenwalde in the Brandenburg region. The 1767 census also records that his wife, Maria Katharina, was from the German village of Alzey in the Kurpfalz.
There are no known surviving male lines of this Schaaf family among the Volga German colonies.
- 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): Ur24.
- Pleve, Igor. Einwanderung in das Wolgagebiet, 1764-1767 Band 4 (Göttingen: Der Göttinger Arbeitskreis, 2008): 273.
- Pleve, Igor. Lists of Colonists to Russia in 1766: Reports by Ivan Kulberg (Saratov: Saratov State Technical University, 2010): #3289.
Brent Mai