Mennonite Family History is a quarterly periodical covering Mennonite, Amish, and Brethren genealogy and family history. Check out the free sample articles on our website for a taste of what can be found inside each issue. The MFH has been published since January 1982. The magazine has an international advisory council, as well as writers. The editors are J. Lemar and Lois Ann Zook Mast.
This issue contains the following articles and [surnames]: Mast Family European Heritage Tour by Diana Mast White [Mast]; Descendants of Swiss Settlers by Joseph H. Smith; Ancestral Families of Sarah Flohr (1880-1963) Married to Norman Arthur Lind (1881-1968), Part IV: Sell, Shell, Brunner, Nold, Ziegler, Bough, and Crumpbacher by Hope Kauffman Lind [Sell, Shell, Brunner, Nold, Ziegler, Bough, Crumpbacher]; Who Was the Wife of Daniel Flohr (1790-1850)? Addendum to "Ancestral Families of Sarah Flohr (1880-1963) Married to Norman Arthur Lind (1881-1968), Parts I and II by Hope Kauffman Lind [Flohr, Rummel, Sounder]; Anabaptist Records Just Found in German Archives by Friedrich Wollmershauser [Bachmann, Wagner, Krehbuhl, Adam, Handschuh, Detweyler, Hirtzler, Maurer, Schneider, Ruth, Wanner, Rohrer, Habich, Meyer, Reinhard, Krauther, Ambsler, Hackmann, Holl, Wenger, Mast, Hostetter, Landas]; Blessed With Eight Generations - Ancestor Fan Chart of Jennifer Ellen Miller [Miller, Hostetler, Schlabach, Martin]; The Hubers from Hausen, Switzerland, to Pennsylvania by Lois Ann Mast [Huber]; Departure Ports of Our Ancestors: Rotterdam by Lois Ann Mast; Children of Bishop Jacob Mast and Magdalena Hooley: David Mast (1770-1849)—Blouse Davy, Innkeeper by Dot (Mast) Moss [Mast, Kurtz]; Four Marriages Between the Bartel, Epp, Franz, Isaac, and Wall Families by Thomas B. Mierau [Bartel, Epp, Isaac, Franz, Wall]; The Groningen Old Flemish Society of Mennonites in Poland, Prussia, and Russia by John D. Richert with contributions from Rodney D. Ratzlaff [Ratzlaff, Wedel, Schmidt, Unruh, Richert, Jantz, Sparling, Voth, Pankratz, Harms, Dirks].
Take a journey across five centuries and eighteen generations, to the heart of the Bergthold family legacy. This is the story of the Bergthold family’s search for freedom and opportunity. More deeply, it is the story of how their experiences shaped the lives and values that the family hold today. The story starts in Switzerland, with the Reformation. Bergtholds (or Berchtolds, as they may have been called then) had lived there years before Martin Luther broke with the Catholic Church. However, the stubbornness and independence of the Anabaptists led them to rebel against established authority. That rebellion led to persecution and motivated the families to move to places where they could live and prosper without oppression. Their journey to seek a better life led them from Switzerland to France, Germany, Ukraine, South Russia and finally to America in the late 1800s. The story of the Bergtholds is presented here as a combination of firsthand research, stories from community members, and additional information about Mennonites across generations. It is part travel memoir and part family history. It shows how the struggles of our ancestors affect us in every way: from the food we like to the decisions we make and the values we hold dear. It also includes text and photos of how the Bergthold families lived, from farming practices to hog butchering.
Mennonites are often associated with food, both by outsiders and by Mennonites themselves. Eating in abundance, eating together, preserving food, and preparing so-called traditional foods are just some of the connections mentioned in cookbooks, food advertising, memoirs, and everyday food talk. Yet since Mennonites are found around the world – from Europe to Canada to Mexico, from Paraguay to India to the Democratic Republic of the Congo – what can it mean to eat like one? In Eating Like a Mennonite Marlene Epp finds that the answer depends on the eater: on their ancestral history, current home, gender, socio-economic position, family traditions, and personal tastes. Originating in central Europe in the sixteenth century, Mennonites migrated around the world even as their religious teachings historically emphasized their separateness from others. The idea of Mennonite food became a way of maintaining community identity, even as unfamiliar environments obliged Mennonites to borrow and learn from their neighbours. Looking at Mennonites past and present, Epp shows that foodstuffs (cuisine) and foodways (practices) depend on historical and cultural context. She explores how diets have evolved as a result of migration, settlement, and mission; how food and gender identities relate to both power and fear; how cookbooks and recipes are full of social meaning; how experiences and memories of food scarcity shape identity; and how food is an expression of religious beliefs – as a symbol, in ritual, and in acts of charity. From zwieback to tamales and from sauerkraut to spring rolls, Eating Like a Mennonite reveals food as a complex ingredient in ethnic, religious, and personal identities, with the ability to create both bonds and boundaries between people.
This Amish and Mennonite genealogy traces 8,757 families descended from 1703 Jacob Hertzler of Berks Co., Pa. Also provides background history and statistical information on the Hertzler-Hartzler families. (733pp. index. hardcover. reprint of 1952 edition. Higginson Book Co.) Please visit www.HigginsonBooks.com to purchase this title.
In the late eighteenth century, the Russian Empire opened the grasslands of southern Ukraine to agricultural settlement by new colonists, among them Prussian Mennonites. Mennonite colonization was one aspect of the empire’s consolidation and modernization of its multi-ethnic territory. In the colony of Molochnaia, the dominant personality of the early nineteenth century was Johann Cornies (1789–1848), a hard-driving modernizer and intimate of senior Russian officials whose papers provide unique access into events in Ukraine in this era. Johann Cornies, the Mennonites, and Russian Colonialism in Southern Ukraine uses the life story of Johann Cornies to explore how colonial subjects interacted with Russian imperial policy. The book reveals how tsarist imperial policy shifted toward Russification in the 1830s and 1840s and became increasingly intolerant of ethnocultural and ethnoreligious minorities. It shows that Russia employed the Mennonite settlement as a colonial laboratory of modernity, and that the Mennonites were among Russia’s most economically productive subjects. This microhistory illuminates the role of Johann Cornies as a mediator between the empire and the Mennonite colonists, and it ultimately aims to bring light to the history of nineteenth-century Russia and Ukraine.
John Werner was a storyteller. A Mennonite immigrant in southern Manitoba, he captivated his audiences with tales of adventure and perseverance. With every telling he constructed and reconstructed the memories of his life. John Werner was a survivor. Born in the Soviet Union just after the Bolshevik Revolution, he was named Hans and grew up in a German-speaking Mennonite community in Siberia. As a young man in Stalinist Russia, he became Ivan and fought as a Red Army soldier in the Second World War. Captured by Germans, he was resettled in occupied Poland where he became Johann, was naturalized and drafted into Hitler’s German army where he served until captured and placed in an American POW camp. He was eventually released and then immigrated to Canada where he became John. The Constructed Mennonite is a unique account of a life shaped by Stalinism, Nazism, migration, famine, and war. It investigates the tenuous spaces where individual experiences inform and become public history; it studies the ways in which memory shapes identity, and reveals how context and audience shape autobiographical narratives.
