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German Village with Six Names

Address:
Munjor, KS 67601

About this Exploration:



The origins for the name of the town of Munjor go back to the German people who established villages along the Volga River in Russia around 1764 to 1768. When the Germans left their homeland and came to settle along the Volga River, they were divided into groups of 100 families and each group was given a leader. Two German speaking Frenchmen with the last name of Monjou became the leaders of two of the groups. The older, Otto de Monjou, became the leader of a Catholic group which settled along the Volga, north of Saratov. The younger Monjou established a colony of Lutherans further south. Both villages were named Monjou, which caused confusion and resulted in the Russian civil authorities to name the northern colony Obermonjou and the southern colony Neidermonjou.

Peter Leiker, from Obermonjou, was one of the five men in the scouting party that came to America in 1874 to find a suitable location to establish new German villages in Kansas or Nebraska. When he and many other immigrants from the town of Obermonjou, some from the colonies of Wittman and Marienthal, and Peter Stoecklein from Gattung arrived to establish a new place to live in Ellis County, they referred to their settlement as Obermonjou. Oftentimes these immigrants had difficulty with reading and writing in English, and their German pronunciation of many words provided the only guide English speaking civil authorities had to create legal documents. It is because of these types of translation errors that Munjor had six different spellings at various times:

Obermonchu, Over Mancha, Obermonjour, Over Muncha, Offermoncha and Monjor. Sometime around 1880 to 1882, the name Munjor was finally accepted by the settlers as a shortened practical version of their native Obermonjou.