aspect of the village's history and current role as an historic site). The church records of the local Lutheran population, whether German or Swedish, survive for part of the nineteenth century (1833-1885), in the archives of the St Petersburg Evangelical Lutheran Consistory, and have been microfilmed by the Genealogical Society of Utah, and partially indexed. For many years, the records for Alt-Schwedendorf were recorded in tandem with those of Josefstal (older German spelling, Josephsthal; its Ukrainian name is Samarivka/Самарівка), an upriver village in the former Ekaterinoslav colonies (which see below) over 250 km to the north whose Lutheran pastors visited Alt-Schwedendorf occasionally to perform marriages, leaving the baptisms and burials to be performed by laymen such as the church sexton or village schoolmaster. During that period, Alt-Schwedendorf was effectively a filial chapelry of Josefstal, meaning that many of the records relevant to its inhabitants have been indexed and appear under the mother parish's name rather than the daughter community to which these folk belonged. Confusing as this may be, successful research into this area can mean one encounters records and studies written not only in German, but in also Swedish, Russian, and English. To complicate matters further, when a large number of the ethnic Swedes of the area were allowed to leave the Soviet Union for Sweden, they were provided with a copy of their original parish registers (in German Kirchenbücher, literally church books, or Matrikeln, for registers) dating back to the foundation of the Swedish colony in 1782. These registers include records covering the ethnic German Lutheran population particularly in cases of intermarriage, and cover the whole period of Swedish habitation up to the partial departure in 1929. Klosterdorf (literally "Monastery (or, abbey) village", in German, and named for the ruins of a former Orthodox monastery in the vicinity; in Russian, ): Roman Catholic, founded in 1804. For many years, Klosterdorf did not have its own priest. Instead it was a filial chapelry served by priests from the city parish of St Pius and St Nicholas in Kherson, part of the Odessa deanery of the Tiraspol Roman Catholic diocese. By 1864, however, the local German Catholic community had raised enough funds to pay for a village chapel dedicated to St Vincent, which eventually became an independent parish church. The last priest, the Reverend Father Johann Lorenzovitch Thauberger, was martyred during the Soviet era repression of worship The whereabouts of