Boger Family

If you look much into family histories and genealogy, you quickly discover lots of sites called "insert family name" family history. In most cases, the perspective is that of whomever put the history together.   In reality though, no story, site, or history is in any way complete, and certainly is not the story of any particular name. My last name is Boger, but it just as well be Schoen, Harms, Kneer, or any of dozens of other family lines that have intersected with the Boger name in my genealogical history.

-Curtis Boger

Johannes Boger

Born 1866 in Michaslthal, Russia, Johannes Boger was my Great-Grandfather.  Check the menu links above to see the first pages of his journal where he describes their immigration to the United States. 

There were many Bogers left behind in Russia; they had a rough time of it.  In the 1930s, the communist government under Stalin manufactured a famine by collectivizing all  farming operations, then taking the crops from this area of what is now the Ukraine.  Then, in 1941 when Hitler invaded Russia, Stalin (in the middle of the night), sent all grown men of German descent to forced labor camps.  At the same time, women and children were loaded on cattle cars and sent by rail east to remote areas of Kazaksthan and Siberia.  Many did not survive.  Many did, and German communities remain to this day in those countries.  In the late 20th century, after the German reunification, many were repatriated into Germany.  This included quite a few of our Boger relatives, which I am in contact with today.

There is of course a significant community of people that trace ancestry to the various groups of Germans that settled in the Steppes region of Russia, especially during the reign of Catherine the Great.  Our ancestors settled and founded the community of Riebensdorf.  You can click this link to find the village book, specficially the list of Bogers that have connection to that city.