any surviving original parish registers of this community are unknown. Under Russian law, however, annual returns copied from the parish registers of birth/baptism, marriage, and death/burial for this community were sent to archives designated by the civil authorities to act as civilian record repositories to document the populace for the purpose of control, taxation, and military service. From 1853 until the shortly after the end of the Russian imperial era, the surviving returns for the area are held in the Tiraspol Roman Catholic Consistory fonds at the Saratov State Archives in Saratov, Russia. Earlier church records are to be found in the fonds covering the Mohilev Roman Catholic Consistory, for the period from 1801 to 1853, with some overlap in the Kherson Roman Catholic Consistory (from 1850 to 1853), until, with the establishment of the diocese of Tiraspol, coverage, backdated by almost a half a decade, became effective from 1853 to 1918. Mühlhausendorf (literally German for village of the mill houses; in Russian, Mykhailovka, in Ukrainian, Mykhailivka, both meaning Michael's village): Lutheran when founded in 1803–1805, with a later admixture of Roman Catholic Germans. Schlangendorf (literally German for Snake village because snakes abounded in the area; known in Russian as Zmi'ivka; in modern-day Ukraine, its Ukrainian name is Zmiivka (Cyrillic alphabet: Зміївка; German rendering Smijiwka): Lutheran when founded in 1803–1805, with a later admixture of Roman Catholic Germans. It now incorporates the area covered by the three other original villages listed above. By 1886, around the time when large-scale emigration to North America began, the population of the four villages was as follows: Alt-Schwedendorf: 515 inhabitants with 65 houses and one Lutheran church Klosterdorf: 773 inhabitants with 52 houses and one Roman Catholic chapel Mühlhausendorf: 489 inhabitants with 48 houses and one Lutheran prayer house Schlangendorf: 474 inhabitants with 46 houses and one Lutheran prayer house Later, as the original villages' population continued to burgeon, despite overseas emigration, there were Tochterkolonien, i.e. daughter colonies, formed, such as, the following, viz.: Friedenheim, founded in 1928 Hagendorf Hoffenthal Neu-Klosterdorf, a daughter colony of Klosterdorf (listed above), which was then called in apposition to her offspring, Alt-Klosterdorf. Today this is the village of Kostyrka, not to be confused with the mother village of the same name now subsumed into Zmiivka. Neu-Schwedendorf, a daughter colony of Alt-Schwedendorf During the Second World War, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941,