My GAUER Ancestors

My GAUER ancestors came from various hamlets (Wirschweiler, Dienstweiler, Eborn, etc) around the town of Birkenfeld, Grand Duchy of Oldenburg, Germany. They lived in this area for at least 150 years but at last the shortage of land and other pressures caused them to leave the homeland. Here is a map of the Oldenburg district in 1971. (Various villages where my ancestors were born are underlined in red).

On Sept 29, 1784 7 families of settlers including a Franz Heinrich GAUER made a private arrangement with the Polish Countess Therese Potoka to settle on her lands in a town called Bedrykowce in the Austro-Hungarian Empire district of Galicia. Franz brought along a family of "6 persons" including his wife, his sons, his brother and his nephew Johann Jacob who is my direct ancestor. As part of the deal Franz got 23 Joch of land which is the equivilant of 23 acres today and he was required to work on the Countess' crops at harvest times. Bedrykowce is now in the Ukraine and spelt Bedrikivci. It is found in the district of Zaleszczyki on the Dniester River less than a mile NW of the town of Zaleszczyki. You can see Zaleszczyki on this 1882 map of Galicia (Bottom right corner, north of Czernowitz) (map courtesy of FEEFHS, 238KB) Here is a detailed map of the Zaleszczyki and Bedrykowce townships (Bedrykowce is underlined in red in the top right corner of this Military Map of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1789-1928, LDS fiche #6000249, 450KB)

Johann Jacob married one of the other settlers daughters Maria Dorothea (nee KUNZ/KUNTZ) and prospered but the same problem of large families on limited land and friction between the settlers and their landlords resulted in the grandson of Johann Jacob, Franz GAUER, emigrating with his wife Elisabetha (nee HERZ/HERTY/HERTZ) and 2 year old son Rudolph from Bedrykowce to the town of Birsula (now known as Kotovsk) in the Kherson District of South Russia. Here is a map of the Kherson district in 1897 ("Birzula" is underlined in red in the top left corner of this image, 156KB). The city of Odessa is at the bottom center of this map 75 km south of Birsula on the Black Sea. There was a large number of mostly agricultural German colonies in the Kherson district in the 1800s however Birsula was a Russian town and a rail center so settling in Birsula was unusual for Germans.

In 1880 Rudolph was confirmed in the Lutheran church in the town of Rosenfeld which is 45 km south of Birsula. I speculate he was that far from home apprenticing at his trade (stonemason) which he later used in Canada.

Two years later in 1882 Rudolphs mother Elizabeth suffer a very traumatic time as on Feb 10 her husband Franz died in Sofiental, Kherson district. Then, on Apr 27th, Franz's 6 year old namesake died and finally, on May 1st, another son, Jacob, was born.

In 1886 Rudolph married Anna SCHMALENBERG in the Evangelical Lutheran Prayerhouse in Nesselrode now part of the southern suburbs of the city of Kotovsk, Ukraine and known as Kujalnik. The Nesselrode prayer house was part of the Reformed Evangelical Lutheran parish of Hoffnungstal until its disappearance sometime around the Russian Revolution. Two sons, Henry and Jacob (my grandfather), were born in 1887 and 1888 respectively in Nesselrode.

In April 1890 Rudolph, his wife, his 2 sons, his mother Elisabeth, his brother Jacob and sisters Julia and Mathilde emigrated from Nesselrode to North America in response to an increasingly heavy handed Russian empire. One sister Emilie was left behind and I still have not found her. Possibly she married and moved elsewhere but, considering the terrible events that swept over that area when the communists took over, the odds are she probably ended up either dead or exiled to Siberia. The family took a train from Nesselrode to Hamburg in Germany and then embarked in steerage on the Hamburg America steamship "Augusta Victoria" for a 9 day trip across the Atlantic.

On Apr 26, 1890 they arrived in New York City and then proceeded by train to Fargo, North Dakota where the family apparently stayed for a year or so before continuing on to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. In Winnipeg Rudolph built a home at 68 Lusted Ave for his family. It still stands where he built it beside the Red River.

The family flourished in Canada and Rudolph and Anna had a total of 9 children. My grandfather, Jacob GAUER, married Amelia DREGER in Winnipeg in 1910 and my father was born in 1920. I was born a second generation Canadian in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1949 to Gordon R.E. GAUER & Marjorie BELL.

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