A true account of our mother's life's experience would, to say the least, give her the credit she deserves for having faced successfully a long list o physical, economic, political, emotional and social problems. Of course, she knew anxieties and fears, but she possessed and used the most effective weapons with which to defeat them: faith. She was a Lutheran.
Actually this story should being with the invitation that the Russian government had extended to the farmers and tradesmen of the various German states to come to that vast country and develop it. In exchange the migrants would be guaranteed a life of political and religious freedom.
Similar promises or guarantees had been offered earlier by the Prussian king, Frederick the Great, but when in the middle of the 18th century he required more troops to satisfy his political ambitions, his religious minded subjects, especially the Lutherans, Baptists, Mennonites and Catholics saw their political and religious freedom jeopardized.
The Russian invitation promised greater opportunities. (By the manifesto of the Russian Empress Catherina II) After careful investigations by various agents on behalf of the prospective immigrants, the conditional contracts between the parties concerned were drawn up, and a mass migration got under way.
There were three distance mass immigrations from Wuerttemberg, the homeland of the Rothe family, to the Volhynia region in the Ukraine, 1816, 1831 and 1861.
History of Rothe & Drude Family as recorded in Searching for Freedom by Richard Rothe & Mother's Faith - Our Heritage Mrs. Agathe Rothe & sons Fred & Richard Rothe
My Great Grandfather, Peter Pansegrau, was born on 08 Sept. 1856, in Annette. He married Anna Neumann, born, 01 May,1860, in Josefin.
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