Widower Peter Zilg, a farmer, and his son Johann Gottfried (age 10¼) arrived from Lübeck at the port of Oranienbaum on 31 May 1766 aboard a galliot named Die Vergoldete Weintraube (The Gilded Grape) under the command of Skipper Joachim Hermann Andersen.
Orphan Gottlieb Zilg arrived in the Volga German colony of Warenburg on 12 May 1767 and is recorded there on the 1767 census in Household No. 177.
In 1788, Gottfried Zilg moved from Warenburg to Dinkel.
The Oranienbaum passenger list records that Peter Zilg came from the German region of Pfalz. The 1767 census records that Johann Gottfried Zilg came from the German village of Pak [?] in the Kurpfalz region.
Various translations of this surname appear as Zies, Zlies, Zilch, Zisch.
- Idt, Andreas and Georg Rauschenbach. Auswanderung deutscher Kolonisten nach Russland im Jahre 1766 (Moscow: Idt & Rauschenbach, 2019): 29.
- Idt, Andreas and Georg Rauschenbach. Deutsche Kolonisten im Jahr 1766 in Oranienbaum und in den Siedlungsorten: Die Kuhlberg-Listen (Moscow: Idt & Rauschenbach, 2024): 138.
- 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): Dn04, Mv2980.
- Pleve, Igor. Einwanderung in das Wolgagebiet, 1764-1767 Band 4 (Göttingen: Der Göttinger Arbeitskreis, 2008): 348.
- Pleve, Igor. Lists of Colonists to Russia in 1766: Reports by Ivan Kulberg (Saratov: Saratov State Technical University, 2010): #822.
Brent Mai