Hays ? The ties that bound the Dorzweiler family in the old Volga German region of southern Russia have been stretched by time, wars and global politics, but they have never been able to be broken.

So comfortable was Leo Dorzweiler with the distant cousins who were making their first trip to the United States that he joked that he was considering putting them to work harvesting wheat.

“It’s not often you get Siberian people to do work in Kansas,” Dorzweiler said. Fortunately for the cousins, who conversed with their American relative in the old Volga German dialect, the wheat binder broke before any work could be done.

Dorzweiler, of the small community of Catherine near Hays, and his cousins represent two of the paths taken by more than 1 million Volga Germans out of the region they began settling in the late 1700s at the invitation of Russian Empress Catherine the Great.

The first exodus occurred in the late 1800s, with the expiration of Catherine’s promise to the Volga Germans of no taxation, no military service and no constraints on the practice of their faith.

Many from that first wave, including Leo Dorzweiler’s family, settled the familiar-looking land of the Great Plains, from western Kansas through the Dakotas and into Minnesota.

But others remained in the German enclave near the Volga River, only to be brusquely exiled to the eastern reaches of the Soviet Union by dictator Josef Stalin when German troops advanced toward the Volga in World War II.

Among those who wound up in Siberia were the forebears of the relatives whom Leo Dorzweiler found on the Internet: Waldemar and Nelli Dorzweiler, both 37, and their daughters Christina, 10, and Nicole, 7; and Peter and Marina Rrich, 38 and 35, and their daughter, Jessica, 9. Leo Dorzweiler was able to entice them into visiting Kansas for the first time.

The two families moved from Siberia to Germany after the Berlin Wall fell, making the same decision as many of the scattered Volga Germans to return to their ancestral homeland.

They rated their favorite aspects of the Midwest as the openness of the prairie land, the beautiful churches and the wind that held the heat in check.

“Our first impression was that everything was big,” Peter Rrich said, speaking in German. “Big cars, wide streets, friendly people, so different.”