14 Hattie Plum Williams 
nucleus, increasingly large and frequent groups of Russian Ger- 
mans have been added. This length of residence together with 
the facts that the immigration has always been a family move- 
ment, and that a large birth rate prevails with this nationality, 
accounts for the great numbers of native born Russian Germans 
in Lincoln. Out of 5,985 persons whose birth place was given, 
30.3 per cent. were born in the United States and 63.0 per cent. 
in Russia." A very small number of the native born are heads 
of families and thus furnish an opportunity to mark the effect of 
American environment upon the second generation born here. 
The majority of the native born, however, are children and 
young people under age. Of the native-born children of Russian 
German parents, 80 per cent. are natives of Lincoln, showing how 
largely this city has been the distributing point for this nationality. 
It has been pointed out frequently that the Russian German 
immigration to America is a family movement. This is true, not 
merely in the sense of the individual family consisting of parents 
and children, but in the larger sense of the undivided or patri- 
archal family as it exists in the German colonies in Russia. It is 
a common saying that everybody in the Lincoln settlements is 
related to everyone else. A child, in response to the question how 
many of her family came when she did, said, “ A whole ship-load.” 
Relationships are recognized to a much more extended degree 
than with us, and second or third cousins, or relatives by marriage, 
with the relatives thereby acquired, are counted as a part of one’s 
“family.”® Endogamy, practiced for a century and a half, has 
literally made the inhabitants of each village one large family, 
and when immigration from any one colony begins, it means that 
a large number of “relatives” will surely follow from that place. 
Thus six colonies have furnished 60 per cent. of the 3,772 foreign- 
born Russian Germans in Lincoln, while the remaining 4o per 
7 All statistics relating to the Russian German settlements are taken 
from or based upon the private census taken in March-April, 1914, unless 
otherwise stated. 
8 The Russian Germans use the word “ freund” as a generic term to 
mean relative, including all degrees except those represented in the imme- 
diate family. 
140 
