My family got out of Russia in 1911 and caught a tramp freighter out of Hamburg heading for Galveston the next spring. My great-grandmother went into labor with my great-aunt Mary as the ship was entering Galveston Bay, so she was taken straight off the ship, thus bypassing immigration. If this hadn't happened, she most likely would not have been allowed into the country, due to a birth defect she had.
Once she was out of the hospital, they caught a train out of Houston to Colorado, where they met up with other Germans who'd been fleeing the crumbling Russian Empire.
Very interesting story. I didn’t knew that a German prince had such power on his serfs in XVIII century.
Your great grandmother—and you—were lucky. In 1941, Stalin deported the Volga Germans and other Voksdeutschen remaining in the Soviet Union to Siberia, Kazakhstan, and other inhospitable places.