It is not known when [our] ancestors came to this area, but Mennonites were allowed to settle along the banks of the Vistula by the Polish King Sigismund as early as 1553. Most of them lived on the eastern bank of the river, somewhat farther south than the village of Moesland in which the Klaassens had their home.

Johann Klaassens, as other Mennonite families, fanned on lowland, near the bank of the river, which had to be drained and cleared of brush and reeds. He doubtless lived on an isolated farm, for the Prussian and Polish Mennonites did not live in compact villages as did the Russian Mennonites. His dwelling house and barns and sheds were joined under one roof and built on elevated ground, either protected by dirt embankment or located on a dike above the water level of the river.

Johann Klaassen's oldest son, Abraham, who was born February 26, 1783, lived on a farm just across the Vistula, in a village called Brescky.

The Klaassen family doubtless attended a Mennonite Church nearby. The nearest church to the village was at Heubuden, about eight miles northwest in the delta region, near Marienburg. Records of this church, however, do not contain evidence of Klaassen membership.

When the Mennonite farmers along the Vistula, and in the delta, were increasingly hampered by economic and religious restrictions after that area came under the jurisdiction of the Prussian Government in 1772, a great migration to Russia began. An edict of King Frederick William II ([reigned] 1786 - 1797) prohibited them from acquiring new land and required those that owned land to subsidize the Lutheran Church. Since land was becoming scarce in their villages, this restriction was particularly onerous for the younger generation. In 1788, the first group of migrants left for Russia and eventually settled in the province of Ekaterinoslav in the Ukraine, establishing a colony that came to be known as the Chortitza or Old Colony. They were followed, in the next half-century, by almost half of the Mennonites in West Prussia.

In 1804, Johann Klaassen decided to leave Prussia. He was then forty-six years old, and his wife fifty-two. His two younger sons, Johann and Jacob, who were still at home, were nineteen and sixteen years of age respectively. His oldest son, Abraham, who had established his own farm across the river, joined his father in the migration. He was married and had two daughters, Susanna and Justina.

The journey of the migrants to the Chortitza, colony took about six weeks. They Came in their own horse-drawn wagons, loaded with furniture and household utensils. After staying over winter at Chortitza, where they aided their poorer religious brethren, they moved southeastward, to the province of Taurida, and established a settlement that came to be known as the Molotschna Colony, named after the Molotschna River that flows into the sea of Azov.

This area, at the time of settlement, was a treeless steppe. It was inhabited only by a few Russian peasants who tilled their soil with wooden plows and harvested their crops with flail and sickle. Occasionally, it was overrun by the nomadic half-savage Tartars who lived a little to the south and who resented the intrusion of the Mennonites much as American Indians resented that of frontiersmen.

Between 1805 and 1808, eighteen villages were established in the Molotschna, most of them in valleys along watercourses. They were compact settlements of about twenty families each. Each family was given 175 acres, laid out in strips running at right angles from the village street.

The village of Tiege, which the Klaassens helped to establish, was about forty-five miles north of the sea of Azov and about three miles east of the Molotschna. River. It was named by Cornelius Toews, one of the migrants, after the village he left behind in Prussia. The Johann Klaassen family arrived there on June 16, 1805, and his son's family eleven days earlier. Most of the settlers came from the delta region in Prussia, but two, including the Johann Klaassen family, came from the village of Moesland, on the western bank of the Vistula. With one exception, a cabinet maker, they were all farmers.

Most of the farmers who migrated to the Molotschna, Colony were quite well-to-do. Many of them, according to a contemporary account, sold their Prussian possessions for goodly sums, each receiving between 30 to 40,000 (42o each) [sic] for them. About twenty percent of them refused the financial assistance offered by the Russian Government to its settlers. It is not known in what financial circumstances the Klaassens came to Russia.

In the first years, the pioneers devoted much of their time to building houses and barns. Their accomplishments were prodigious. A German traveler, who visited their villages in 1807, reported that "their houses,- barns, granaries, gardens and fields reflect a sense of orderliness and great industry... In two years of their settlement here they have made remarkable progress, for few unfinished houses remain. This is an excellent indication of their industry if one reflects on what is required to erect houses here."

They built long structures, at right angles to the village street, each of which served as a dwelling place, granary, barn and shed. They used the materials at hand for construction, erecting walls from solid mud or adobe bricks and using lumber sparingly, for it had to be hauled at a great distance from Ekaterinoslav.

Their dwelling places were arranged according to a uniform pattern. Each had a front entrance to a hall or Vorderhaus.To one side of this was a parlor, or Grosse Stube, used only for occasional guests. To the other side of the hall was a small room, or Sommerstube so-called because it was unheated. It was used for the teenage children. Just to the rear of the hall was a small kitchen, and in the chimney, above the stove, was a place for smoking hams and sausages. Beyond the kitchen was a back hall, or Hinterhaus. To one side of this was a small room, or Kleine Stube. for little children, and beyond this, in the comer of the house, was a bedroom, or Eckstube used as a bedroom by the parents. These two rooms and the parlor were heated by an ingenious long brick stove that extended into them [and] in which straw, wood, and dried manure were burned. The stove's extension into the parlor was called an oven bench, or Ofenbank The attic was used for storing grain and feed, the basement for storing food.

"For the most part," said the German traveler, "they had attractive furnishings such as walnut chests, wardrobes, chairs, tables, and bedsteads which they brought with them, so that their houses were quite cheerful inside..." A parlor usually contained a table and chairs; a chest of drawers, with a mirror above; the oven bench, with the traditional Mennonite clock above; a china closet, or Glausschaup in which the family heirlooms were displayed; and a wardrobe, or Kleedaschaup, in which the family's Sunday clothes were kept. In one comer stood a bedstead, piled high with bedding and pillows for use of guests. The small front room for the teenagers contained a bed, table, and chairs, and occasionally some carpenter tools. The children's room had two benches, or Schlafbaenke, which, similar to modem sofas, were pulled out at night to make double beds.

Their barns were connected to their dwelling places, either directly or by a short hallway. They had stalls on one side for horses and on the other for cattle. Attached to their barns were sheds used for storing hay, straw and implements.

In the first years, the villagers did not attempt to place much of the acreage that was given to them by the Russian Government under cultivation, for grain-raising was difficult for lack of implements. They broke small fields of the virgin sod in order to raise potatoes, which they introduced into Russia, and other vegetables, and to raise flax to produce linen for household uses. Their chief agricultural activity, initially, consisted of raising cattle, which they pastured in summer on the verdant grass of the steppes and fed in winter with hay they had cut. Their cattle were of the East Frisian variety, which they brought with them from Prussia, and which they later crossed with local breeds.

A measure of Johann's prosperity is provided in an 1808 census of the Mennonite villages in the Molotschna. After three years of farming, Johann possessed a wagon, harrow, and plow which he shared with his son Abraham. With these implements he evidently began raising cereal crops, for the census shows that he had 150 shocks of unthreshed grain. For threshing he probably used a horsedrawn roller, running it over the grain on a threshing floor. He owned seven horses. He was also fairly successful in cattle-raising, for he owned twelve head of cattle and had cut twenty loads of hay to feed them in the winter.

Johann and his family doubtless attended the Orloff Church, in a neighboring village just a short distance from Tiege. In 1809, Czar Alexander 1, a great benefactor of the Mennonites, contributed 6,000 rubles for the construction of its building. This Russian Czar was peculiarly attracted to the Mennonites because of their attitude toward war, which he shared with them after the defeat of the Napoleonic armies. After the battle of Waterloo he was much concerned with the establishment of a permanent system of peace. Under the teachings of the Quakers and German pietists, of whom the Baroness Juliana von Kruedener and Heinrich Stilling were the most influential, he conceived the idea of a Holy Alliance, which took the form of a public manifesto in which the rulers of Europe pledged themselves to govern their internal affairs and their international relations in accordance with Christian principles of justice, charity, and peace.

The minister at Orloff, while the Johann Klaassen family attended the church, was Elder Jakob Enns ([elder from] 1805 - 1818), who belonged to the Flemish, or strict, -variety of Mennonites, and who attempted to bring up his parishioners in the stem ancestral doctrine of separateness from this world, with its preoccupation with things of a future heavenly realm. This doctrine, it seems, was somewhat tested during pioneer days when the problems of earthly existence thrust themselves on the attention of the Mennonite settlers, and led them, as they have other pioneers, to give first thought to material matters and to neglect those of a spiritual or cultural significance. The spiritual apathy, in the first half century of settlement, led to three schismatic movements among the Mennonites in Russia which resulted in the establishment of the Kleine Gemeinde (1812), the Mennonite Brethren (1860), and the Krimmer Mennonite Brethren (1869). The Klaassen family was affected by all three of these movements.

Johann died at a relatively young age, shortly after his fifty-fifth birthday. There was, of course, no medical help available to him in his last years, for the settlers relied on homemade cures - herbs and poultices and other nostrums passed down from father to son.

On November 9, 1781, Johann married Helena Konrad, or Konrath (Sept. 29, 1752 - Nov. 30, 1818), a widow, several years older than he, whose first husband was named Martens.

Helena was fifty-two years old when she came to Russia with her two sons and husband. She experienced the hardships of pioneer life. As [did] her husband, she worked from daybreak to dark, her whole being bent on toil and thrift. She gathered in the food her family needed - cured the meat, stowed away the potatoes and vegetables, pickled the melons and cucumbers, dried the apples and other fruits, and, in rare trips to the market, laid in store such things as she could not produce at home. She set before her hungry family the dishes she had been taught to prepare by her mother the meats and soups and pastries that were the typical products of a Mennonite kitchen.

In winter, when they had a supply of such things as they needed, when the horses and cattle were in the barn, and all were snug in the cold weather, she and her husband would occasionally settle down and enjoy a brief respite from their toil. And in these moments they must have reflected on their good fortune in coming to Russia, for they now had their own home and their own farm. They were free to worship as they pleased, free from military service, free from governmental and ecclesiastical extortions of the country they left behind. They now enjoyed the benevolence of their rulers, who gave them land to cultivate, trees to plant, breeding stock to improve their herds, money to build their church, who maintained order in their villages, and protected them from the marauding Tartars.

Johann [Klaassen 1758 - 1812] and Helena [Konrad 1752 – 1818] had three sons that lived to maturity:

~~ Abraham (Feb. 26, 1783 - Feb. 13, 1846), who settled as a farmer in Tiege;

~~ Johann (July 23, 1785 - Oct. 28, 1841), [our direct ancestor]; and

~~ Jacob (Jan 14, 1788 - ? ).

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