Buried on the Saskatchewan Prairie

I blogged earlier about marking the grave of my great-great-grandfather Johann Sudermann.  Here's the story of another grave that I helped to mark.

My great-grandfather Gerhard T. Siemens #6463 (1834-1908) died near Main Centre, Sask.; but I didn't know where he was buried.  I was researching about his life in general, and I ran across a reference to a history of the Exelsior rural municipality where he had lived called Excelsior Echoes.  I couldn't find a copy of the book, so I wrote an e-mail to the RM office and asked if I could buy a copy of the book.  It was out of print, but they kindly sent me a copy of the pages with the Gerhard Siemens story.  Below is a snippet from that story:

Source:  Excelsior Echoes (Rush Lake History Book Committee, 1982) p. 1094.

Although the death year was inaccurate, the information about his burial place looked interesting.  However, I couldn't understand why he would have been buried in a Mennonite Brethren cemetery - as best I can tell, he was a Kleine Gemeinde member all his life.  Next, I wrote to the Main Centre MB church, and they confirmed that he had been buried there, but they didn't know why either.

A year later, I was in Manitoba for a family reunion, so I decided to take a few extra days to go to Saskatchewan to see where he had lived and was buried.  I found the quarter-section of land that he had homesteaded in 1903, pictured below.

And I found his burial plot in the Main Centre, Sask., MB cemetery with a simple marker.

Gerhard T. Siemens old tombstone - now replaced, Main Centre Mennonite Brethren cemetery, Main Centre, Saskatchewan, plot #13, numbered from NW corner, photo by author, July 2014.

The church's cemetery committee had done a fantastic job researching the burials and putting up metal markers on all the plots that had no marker, which included Gerhard's.  But these metal markers are only intended for temporary use, and some of the numbers were already falling out.  I didn't want his grave to be forgotten because he had done so much to bring the Siemens family to North America and to pass on his faith in God to his descendants.  I know that I benefit from his life today.

So I found a monument company in the nearby town of Morse, got prices, and organized an effort by my cousins and even a few second cousins to put up a granite marker. I put an anchor on the tombstone because for centuries that was the Mennonite symbol instead of the cross - it refers to our hope in Jesus that is an anchor for the soul from Hebrews 6.   I had the verse I Thessalonions 4.13, that we should not grieve as those who have no hope, put on the stone because that was the one that his son Abraham used in his father's obituary, so I felt it was appropriate.

Gerhard T. Siemens tombstone, Main Centre Mennonite Brethren cemetery, Main Centre, Saskatchewan, plot #13, numbered from NW corner, photo by Rick of Grassland Memorials, Morse, Saskatchewan.

So how did Gerhard's earthly body wind up in the Mennonite Brethren cemetery of a church that he had never attended?  The cemetery coordinator for the church had been very active in compiling the RM history book, so she had interviewed many elderly people for their stories.  Amazingly, one of those was Gerhard's step-grandson, Gerhard Rempel, who was a small child at the time.  He told how the family had decided that Gerhard's body should be moved from the garden to an actual church cemetery - his parents had joined the Main Centre MB church after Gerhard Siemens's death.  They dug up the coffin from the garden, put it on chairs in the yard, and decided to open it.  Little Gerhard still remembered 80 years later how the wind came up as they opened the lid and blew dust out of the coffin.  And then they re-buried the coffin in the Mennonite Brethren church cemetery where they then attended, even though Gerhard Siemens had never gone there.

I've never seen the new gravestone, but I believe it is a fitting monument for the man who brought the Siemens to North America in 1874.

3 Types of West Prussian Mennonite Church Books

The church books kept by Mennonites in West Prussia fall into three main categories:  the family book, the vital statistics register, and the baptism register.  Here's an example of each.

First, the family book.  These are organized geographically, listing all the families in one village at a certain time and then continuing to add to them as events happened.  These books are especially useful for two reasons - they often list the parents of the husband and wife, and sometimes even information about the parents, so can be used to go back a generation before the stated beginning date of the book.  Also, they group all the children of a family together and name the wife, which other books usually do not.  There are some limitations - the elder who compiled the book may not have known all the dates and places, so there are often blanks instead of information.  Also, at least the initial compilation of the book was not done contemporaneously with the events recorded, so the information may not be as reliable as the vital statistics register.

Here is an example of a random family from the Rosenort church book, Cornelius Wiens and Maria Duick. 

Source:  Rosenort Mennonite family book, 1772-1880, KB Ro 1.2, Rosenort, West Prussia, Mennonitischen Forschungsstelle, Weierhof, Germany. p. 5-6.

The blue oval is the village name of Blumenort, the green oval is the names of the husband and wife, the red box is the names of the children, the purple line marks the columns with dates for birth, baptism, and death, and the yellow box is the name of the parents of the husband and wife.  Unusually, there is no column for marriage date, although a note says that Cornelius and Maria were married in 1857.

A link to Andreas Riesen's extraction of the information from this book is here, but if you want the images from the book, you have to buy the Rosenort DVD from the Mennonite center in Weierhof, Germany.

Next is the vital statistics register, which includes lists of births, marriages, and deaths in a congregation chronologically.  Usually, all the events are in one book, and there is a page for each type of event in a single year, but sometimes there are separate books for each of the three event types.  These books were created more or less contemporaneously with the event, so they are the most reliable.  But they usually only list the father's name and village, and sometimes not even that.  It can be hard to group children into families and to figure out the name of the wife since that information is usually not provided.  Since it wasn't obligatory to record data in these books until sometime in the 1800s, individual events and even whole families may be missing.  Sometimes the marriage lists are found in the diaries of elders or ministers.

Here is a random example from Tiegenhagen for the births of 1804:

Source:  Tiegenhagen Mennonite church book, 1780-1831, KB Pe 1.0, Tiegenhagen, West Prussia, Mennonitischen Forschungsstelle, Weierhof, Germany, p. 75.

Each line lists the date of birth, the father, the village of residence, the child's name, and a mark for the child's sex.  Scans of the book are available at the web site of the Mennonite Library and Archives in North Newton, Kans, as well as a transcription of the book by John Thiesen.  Andreas Riesen has extracted the data here.

Finally, there is the baptismal register.  Since Mennonites were typically baptized as young adults, these records do not function like the baptismal records in the German Evangelical parish records, which usually function as birth records.  Usually, these books were kept by the elder and give the father's name, village of residence, and child's name and noted whether or not the father was still alive.  Since Mennonite young people in West Prussia in the late 1700s and early 1800s were usually baptized about the age of 17-20, you can still get a good idea of when a person was born.  (In later times periods, the age ranged widened and typically baptismal candidates were older.)

Here is a random example from the Gross Werder baptismal register from 1785 for Rosenort.  The Gross Werder had started as one congregation, but in 1735 it was divided into four congregations, Tiegenhagen, Ladekopp, Rosenort, and Bärwalde, although the single elder continued to maintain one baptismal register for decades.

Source:  Gross Werder Mennonite baptismal register, 1782-1840, KB WP 1.1, Petershagen, West Prussia, State Archives, Gdansk, Poland, APG 779 Nr. 1, p.15.  Accessed at https://mla.bethelks.edu/archives/cong_316/tiessen/IMG_3015.JPG on 25 February 2017.

Scans of the book are available at the MLA web site, and Riesen's extraction is here.

Let us know in a comment about your experience with Mennonite church books.

New Approach to West Prussian Censuses

At least it's a new approach for me - maybe it's old hat for a lot of you.  But I thought I would share it in case you haven't ever used it before.

I have a brick wall in the person of my five-greats-grandfather, Gerhard Fast #660202 (1739-1828).  It's going to be a tough one to break through that will probably require finding new record sets.  But before I embark on the expense of archival research to find more record sets, I thought I should organize the information about the earliest Fasts that is available in the area where he lived, the Gross Werder in West Prussia.

I even realized that Gerhard's father or mother might be mentioned in the 1772 or 1776 censuses - but if they are, I wouldn't recognize them because I don't know their names.  Since Gerhard's oldest known sibling was born ABT 1737, his parents might have been born about 1715, which would make them about 60 years old in those two censuses.  So it would be quite possible for one or both of them to be listed there.

I started with the 1776 census for three reasons:  1) Glenn Penner had already extracted the data, so it was easy to work with, 2) it was specifically of Mennonites, and 3) I had copied all the pages of the census from LDS microfilm #105655, so I can check the original.

Source:  1776 Special Consignation of Mennonite families, West Prussia, II. HA, Abt. 9, Materien, Tit. CIX, Nr. 1, Vol. 1, p. 17-125, Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, Germany.  Accessed on FHL film #1056552. 

I have worked through five of the thirty-one Fasts in the census, and I have made a lot of connections with their children who were in Grandma. 

Abraham Fast might be #1350958
Anthon Fast #932518 (1732-1782)
Claas Fast #706529 (1745-1820)
Cornelius Fast #932218 (ABT 1722-1807)
Gerhard Fast #660202 (1739-1828) my ancestor
Jacob Fast #531527 (ABT 1752-1808)


None of them solved my brick wall, but they are all someone's brick wall.  Since Mennonites lived in clusters, I highly recommend this technique for whatever region you are stuck.  Try to piece together the families of the other people with the same surname living in the same Mennonite cluster - there is a good chance you will find relatives there.

I'll post more on specific results from this project as I go along, but I wanted to get some preliminary results posted here to motivate others to do the same.