On Nov 2, 2010, at 3:53:11 PM, [email protected] wrote: The Volga-Germans were referred to as colonists in the 1850 and 1857 Revision Lists; this may be semantic or their actual legal standing. It would be interesting to know whether any legal change was made in their status in the early 1870s, when the VG men?became subject to conscription. ? Bill Pickelhaupt ====== It appears that there were different levels of citizenship in Russia.  All of my Frueauf ancestors are omitted from both the Norka census of 1834 and 1857 which were census reports of the German colonists.  It is well known that there were a number of the members of the Frueauf family living in Norka at that time because there are many listings of various members of the family in the church book baptisms, confirmations, marriages, and deaths.  Brent Mai in checking his translations of these two census reports, assured me that none of the members of the Frueauf family were listed.  Later he found a reference to them and a few others as German nationals. The first of the Fureauf family to come to the Volga region was Carl Jacob Frueauf who came as a Lutheran minister and was not an original colonist.  Brent and I are both still curious as to how many others were not counted in the Norka census reports of 1834 and 1857 and why. In 1998, while visiting some distant relatives who had left Russia and moved to Germany, I asked how the German government knew that they were German.  I was told that when they were born, their Russian passports were stamped "German."   It would appear that even today the descendants of the original German colonists are still considered German colonists rather than Russian citizens. Ruth Schultz