Ancestors

Phillip Bieker

Phillip Bieker was born on 15 August 1853 in Obermonjou, a German Catholic colony on the meadow side of the Volga above Saratov, in the Russian province of Samara. The census of 1900 makes him a little older, born in September 1851. He was the son of Heinrich Bieker and his second wife Elizabeth Herman. His father had been born in the colony in 1825, a grandson of the founders who came out from Germany in the 1760s on the promise of the Empress Catherine, and had married first a Mueller girl from Schoenchen and then, about 1852, Elizabeth. Phillip grew up with a half-sister Anna Maria and a half-brother Conrad from the first marriage and three younger sisters from the second.

In 1874, when the Russian government took away the exemption from military service that the colonists had held for a century, the Volga villages began to send out their young men. Phillip was already married, to Dorothy Siegel, a girl a year younger; their first son Jacob was born in 1874. In 1875 the Biekers left. Heinrich, his brothers Nikolaus, Johannes and Joseph, and their families sailed from Bremen on the steamship Ohio and landed at Baltimore on 23 November 1875, among the first Volga German families to reach America. They went on by rail to Kansas, where the Catholics from Obermonjou, Herzog and Pfeifer were taking up railroad and homestead land in Ellis and Rush Counties and founding colonies with the old names.

The little Jacob died in 1878. In 1880 Phillip, 28, and Dorothea were farming in Big Timber Township, Rush County, with two sons, Andrew and John. His father died in 1882. By 1895 the family had moved north to Russell County, to the Catholic district around Gorham on the Union Pacific line, where the state census listed Phillip, 43, Dora, 42, his widowed mother Elizabeth, 65, and the boys Andrew, John, Martin, Phillip and Henry. Jacob, the second of that name, was born in 1896 and Frances in 1898. In 1900 he was a farmer of Winterset Township with his mother Elizabeth, 70, still in the house; she died in 1909. In 1910 and 1930 the farm was in Big Creek Township.

Phillip Bieker died on 14 June 1930, aged 76. He is buried in St. Mary's Cemetery at Gorham under a granite stone shared with Dorothy, who outlived him by fifteen years: BIEKER, PHILLIP 1853-1930, DOROTHY 1854-1945, below a tall stone cross with the family name.

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Cite: Heirology, "Phillip Bieker (1853-1930)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/phillip-bieker-1853-1930-94c3cc.