Boger Family History

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 could 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

Born 1866 in Michaslthal, Russia, Johannes Boger was my great-grandfather. He kept a journal describing the family's immigration to the United States — the first pages are in the documents below.

Many Bogers were left behind in Russia and had a rough time of it. In the 1930s Stalin's government manufactured a famine by collectivizing all farming in what is now Ukraine. In 1941, when Hitler invaded, grown men of German descent were sent to forced-labor camps while women and children were loaded onto cattle cars bound for Kazakhstan and Siberia. Many did not survive; many did, and German communities remain there today. After German reunification, many relatives were repatriated to Germany — some of whom I am still in contact with.

Our ancestors settled and founded the community of Riebensdorf. The village book in the Research section lists the Bogers connected to that city.