We have 14 immigrant trunks from the 1870s in our collection - most of them Mennonite in origin. They range from simple freight trunks built for the voyage to America all the way to heirloom dowry chests passed down for many generations.
Tuesday, June 27, 2017
Immigrant Trunk Exhibit - Hillsboro, Kans., Museums
We have 14 immigrant trunks from the 1870s in our collection - most of them Mennonite in origin. They range from simple freight trunks built for the voyage to America all the way to heirloom dowry chests passed down for many generations.
Monday, June 26, 2017
A Book That Speaks (If You Know How to Listen)
I've just been given a book that was destined for the trash. It's an old German book, Ausgewählte Schriften (Selected Writings), by Pieter Pietersz (or Peter Peters in German), a Dutch Anabaptist builder of windmills, preacher, and writer, who lived 1574 - 1651. He was a popular preacher and writer in his own time, but he didn't have the sustained influence of someone such Menno Simons. As Mennonites shifted from reading Dutch to High German when they lived in West Prussia, the writings of many of the Dutch founders of the Anabaptist movement lost favor. However, his popularity rose again among the Kleine Gemeinde in Russia as they revived many of the old Dutch Anabaptists by translating their works into the German that their members could read.
Here's the cover page of the book:
The book was published in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1865, and Harold Bender in his article on the Kleine Gemeinde at GAMEO suggests that the Kleine Gemeinde sponsored the publication of this book. (BTW, the article is quite biased against the KG, so don't take the rest of it at face value.)
In the next post, I'll share why this book was so important to me.
Here's the cover page of the book:
The book was published in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1865, and Harold Bender in his article on the Kleine Gemeinde at GAMEO suggests that the Kleine Gemeinde sponsored the publication of this book. (BTW, the article is quite biased against the KG, so don't take the rest of it at face value.)
In the next post, I'll share why this book was so important to me.
Wednesday, June 21, 2017
Y-DNA for Mennonites (Part III)
You may read my last post on Y-DNA for Mennonites for the beginning of this series.
Next Steps. Whether or not you have already tested your Y-DNA, you should download the Excel spreadsheet (table) mentioned at the beginning of this web page. You can at least see how many different groups there are with the surname(s) you are interested in. Just be aware that there might be more surname groups discovered as more men of your surname get tested. You might get lucky and see that a descendant of one of your ancestors has been tested already.
Next read the discussion that Tim Janzen wrote for most Mennonite surnames and their groupings. And if you have one of a few Mennonite surnames that are commonly confused, you'll want to read this page.
Getting Tested. Currently Family Tree DNA is the only company that tests Y-DNA; and since they have a monopoly, their prices have stayed high while the prices of autosomal DNA have dropped as competitors have come into the market. Getting the 37-marker test currently costs $169, and the 67-marker test costs $268. The 37-marker test is a good place to start, and you can upgrade to the 67-marker test later if you need to.
I've only tested the Y-DNA of two lines, my own and that of my mother's brother, so I have the lines of two of my four grandparents. I would do more if it weren't so pricey.
Remember if you are female, you can have a male relative tested for you. It just needs to be a direct male descendant of the ancestor that you are targeting. And this applies to males who are testing anything but their direct paternal line, as well. So I could test my mother's brother to get results for my maternal grandfather.
Leave a comment telling us about your experience with Y-DNA.
Next Steps. Whether or not you have already tested your Y-DNA, you should download the Excel spreadsheet (table) mentioned at the beginning of this web page. You can at least see how many different groups there are with the surname(s) you are interested in. Just be aware that there might be more surname groups discovered as more men of your surname get tested. You might get lucky and see that a descendant of one of your ancestors has been tested already.
Next read the discussion that Tim Janzen wrote for most Mennonite surnames and their groupings. And if you have one of a few Mennonite surnames that are commonly confused, you'll want to read this page.
Getting Tested. Currently Family Tree DNA is the only company that tests Y-DNA; and since they have a monopoly, their prices have stayed high while the prices of autosomal DNA have dropped as competitors have come into the market. Getting the 37-marker test currently costs $169, and the 67-marker test costs $268. The 37-marker test is a good place to start, and you can upgrade to the 67-marker test later if you need to.
I've only tested the Y-DNA of two lines, my own and that of my mother's brother, so I have the lines of two of my four grandparents. I would do more if it weren't so pricey.
Remember if you are female, you can have a male relative tested for you. It just needs to be a direct male descendant of the ancestor that you are targeting. And this applies to males who are testing anything but their direct paternal line, as well. So I could test my mother's brother to get results for my maternal grandfather.
Leave a comment telling us about your experience with Y-DNA.
Monday, June 19, 2017
Y-DNA for Mennonites (Part II)
In my last post, I briefly explained how I think you can use Y-DNA to show that all Mennonite Fasts in West Prussia are likely descended from a fairly recent ancestor.
But the situation is a little different for my maternal lines, the Siemens. If you look at the table of Mennonite Y-DNA and surnames maintained by Glenn Penner, you can see how the Mennonite surnames break down into groups. For instance, if you scroll down to the Siemens, you can see that Glenn has broken them up into two groups, separated by the bold line. The first four men tested share virtually the same Y chromosome, while the second five men do as well. But the first and second groups are different from each other. The columns on the right are the number of times certain sequences of DNA molecules repeat. Here's a snip from the spreadsheet:
I had my uncle, my mom's brother, tested before he passed away; and his Y-DNA matched the first group. If I would research the ancestries of those three men, they should converge at some point, perhaps in the 1600s. It also means that there is no point trying to connect to the ancestries of the Siemens men in the second group.
When I checked in Grandma, I found that the man on the third line, Jacob Siemens #2169, was born in Alt-Muensterberg in 1764, which is the same village in which my 4-greats-grandfather Klaas Johann Siemens #46557 was married in 1787. That would make them of about the same generation.
I haven't started on this project yet because I am working on connecting Fasts in the 1776 census. But once I finish with the Fasts, I will take up this group of Siemens and see where it leads.
BTW, I have had no success using the list of matches at FTDNA for my Y-DNA. Out of the hundred or more matches for each of my two surnames tested, Fast and Siemens, I have had only one match with a Fast surname and none with a Siemens surname. I think this is because both these lines are of Dutch and Flemish origin, and the Dutch only took surnames late in history. It's much better to use the Mennonite Y-DNA table that Glenn Penner has put together.
But the situation is a little different for my maternal lines, the Siemens. If you look at the table of Mennonite Y-DNA and surnames maintained by Glenn Penner, you can see how the Mennonite surnames break down into groups. For instance, if you scroll down to the Siemens, you can see that Glenn has broken them up into two groups, separated by the bold line. The first four men tested share virtually the same Y chromosome, while the second five men do as well. But the first and second groups are different from each other. The columns on the right are the number of times certain sequences of DNA molecules repeat. Here's a snip from the spreadsheet:
I had my uncle, my mom's brother, tested before he passed away; and his Y-DNA matched the first group. If I would research the ancestries of those three men, they should converge at some point, perhaps in the 1600s. It also means that there is no point trying to connect to the ancestries of the Siemens men in the second group.
When I checked in Grandma, I found that the man on the third line, Jacob Siemens #2169, was born in Alt-Muensterberg in 1764, which is the same village in which my 4-greats-grandfather Klaas Johann Siemens #46557 was married in 1787. That would make them of about the same generation.
I haven't started on this project yet because I am working on connecting Fasts in the 1776 census. But once I finish with the Fasts, I will take up this group of Siemens and see where it leads.
BTW, I have had no success using the list of matches at FTDNA for my Y-DNA. Out of the hundred or more matches for each of my two surnames tested, Fast and Siemens, I have had only one match with a Fast surname and none with a Siemens surname. I think this is because both these lines are of Dutch and Flemish origin, and the Dutch only took surnames late in history. It's much better to use the Mennonite Y-DNA table that Glenn Penner has put together.
Y-DNA for Mennonites (Part I)
Autosomal DNA is all the rage in the genealogy world. But it seems to me that Y-DNA is actually more useful for most Mennonites. Since we are an endogamous people, it's a lot harder to get useful results with autosomal DNA (see my last post on this topic) because distant cousins appear to be much more closely related than they actually are, which makes it much harder to figure out the relationship with them. However, Y-DNA is a different story.
Y-DNA is the genetic material that is handed down from father to son - mostly unchanged. The key word is "mostly." Since Y-DNA changes slowly, we can use it to determine how closely related the paternal lines of two men are likely to be. (Women are not left out - you can have a brother or cousin or some other male relative test for you.) The number of changes in the Y chromosome can give you an estimate of how far back you had a common ancestor. It's only an estimate - for example, a 90% chance that your common ancestor lived 7 generations ago. This fact can be used to group Mennonite men of the same surname into groups who are more closely related to each other.
I have tested myself for my Fast line and my maternal uncle for my Siemens line. All the Mennonite Fasts test previously had proven to be closely related to one another. (By closely, I mean that the earliest ancestors of these Fasts in the 1700s were probably distant cousins.) And my Y-DNA test showed the same. My earliest known Fast ancestor, Gerhard Fast #660202 (1739-1828) was related to all the other Fasts tested. In fact, the common ancestor of all of them might have lived in the 1600s or perhaps 1500s.
This means that I can profitably pursue researching any of the Fast lines to try to get them to connect.
This is a schematic of how I think the Fast lines in West Prussia in the 1700s connect. Say that the red line traces my ancestry back to Gerhard Fast #660202 (1739-1828). The other solid lines are known ancestral lines that connect back to the other Fasts in West Prussia. At the top of each line, for example, would be one of the 33 Fasts in the 1776 census of Mennonites in West Prussia. We don't know how any of them relate based on genealogical proof. But based on Y-DNA results, we can be pretty sure that they all go back to some common Fast ancestor who lived 100-200 years earlier. The dotted lines represent the pedigree chart going from the current known ancestors back to the earliest Fast, the generations we don't know yet. So if I work to connect them, it's not a wild goose chase because they should all connect at some point.
Y-DNA is the genetic material that is handed down from father to son - mostly unchanged. The key word is "mostly." Since Y-DNA changes slowly, we can use it to determine how closely related the paternal lines of two men are likely to be. (Women are not left out - you can have a brother or cousin or some other male relative test for you.) The number of changes in the Y chromosome can give you an estimate of how far back you had a common ancestor. It's only an estimate - for example, a 90% chance that your common ancestor lived 7 generations ago. This fact can be used to group Mennonite men of the same surname into groups who are more closely related to each other.
I have tested myself for my Fast line and my maternal uncle for my Siemens line. All the Mennonite Fasts test previously had proven to be closely related to one another. (By closely, I mean that the earliest ancestors of these Fasts in the 1700s were probably distant cousins.) And my Y-DNA test showed the same. My earliest known Fast ancestor, Gerhard Fast #660202 (1739-1828) was related to all the other Fasts tested. In fact, the common ancestor of all of them might have lived in the 1600s or perhaps 1500s.
This means that I can profitably pursue researching any of the Fast lines to try to get them to connect.
This is a schematic of how I think the Fast lines in West Prussia in the 1700s connect. Say that the red line traces my ancestry back to Gerhard Fast #660202 (1739-1828). The other solid lines are known ancestral lines that connect back to the other Fasts in West Prussia. At the top of each line, for example, would be one of the 33 Fasts in the 1776 census of Mennonites in West Prussia. We don't know how any of them relate based on genealogical proof. But based on Y-DNA results, we can be pretty sure that they all go back to some common Fast ancestor who lived 100-200 years earlier. The dotted lines represent the pedigree chart going from the current known ancestors back to the earliest Fast, the generations we don't know yet. So if I work to connect them, it's not a wild goose chase because they should all connect at some point.
Friday, June 2, 2017
Autosomal DNA for Mennonites
Autosomal DNA (atDNA) testing is all the rage these days. Webinars, conferences, and lectures all tout the benefits; but if you are of Mennonite descent, should you be so excited? My answer is, generally, no. Low German Mennonites have been a highly endogamous people until recently, and atDNA is very difficult to use with endogamous groups.
A few definitions - autosomal DNA is the DNA on your 22 pairs of chromosomes that come half from your father and half from your mother. This DNA test is used to find stretches of identical DNA that you likely inherited from any of your ancestors. Here is a wiki with more information.
An endogamous group is one that has mostly married within itself for a long period of time. As a result, members of an endogamous group are related to each other in many different ways. You can inherit pieces of identical DNA from multiple ancestors and thus appear to be related much more closely to someone than you really are. For example, my parents are 3rd cousins once removed in two different ways, 4th cousins, 5th cousins, and 7th cousins once removed. And these are just the ones I know about.
For example, I have Klaas Johann Siemens #46557 (ABT 1758-1834) as a 3-greats-grandfather on my mom's side and a 4-greats-grandfather on my dad's side. This is one of the relationships that makes them third cousins once removed. Very likely Klaas Johann Siemens passed the same piece (or several pieces) of DNA to me via both my dad and my mom. If I have a DNA match with another of his descendants, it looks as though we are much more closely related than we really are because I am getting DNA from two paths from Klaas Johan Siemens, not just the normal one path from one parent. And then when you have several of these kind of relationships in your ancestry, it really starts to add up.
So someone who appears to be a 2nd cousin based on the amount of shared DNA might really be a 4th or 5th cousin or even more distant. In fact, I have a number of matches that are supposed to be 1st and 2nd cousins (based on DNA testing) whom I know are NOT actually 1st and 2nd cousins. It would require the testing of many, many cousins (probably dozens or scores of cousins) to untangle all these relationships.
In my personal case, I tested at 23andMe in 2012, and I think it was a waste of money. I also uploaded my results for free to Gedmatch. Neither produced any genealogical results.
There is one case where atDNA would be useful for someone of Low German Mennonite descent. If you are searching for a recent ancestor, say a parent, grandparent, or great-grandparent, then it would be worth doing. This would occur in cases of adoption, recent non-paternal events, or if your family has lost information about the most recent generations. You will still get results that show matches who are supposedly more closely related than they actually are. But these are easier to work through for recent generations. And you may not have any other good options for doing research.
In the comments please share your experiences, positive and negative, with atDNA.
A few definitions - autosomal DNA is the DNA on your 22 pairs of chromosomes that come half from your father and half from your mother. This DNA test is used to find stretches of identical DNA that you likely inherited from any of your ancestors. Here is a wiki with more information.
An endogamous group is one that has mostly married within itself for a long period of time. As a result, members of an endogamous group are related to each other in many different ways. You can inherit pieces of identical DNA from multiple ancestors and thus appear to be related much more closely to someone than you really are. For example, my parents are 3rd cousins once removed in two different ways, 4th cousins, 5th cousins, and 7th cousins once removed. And these are just the ones I know about.
For example, I have Klaas Johann Siemens #46557 (ABT 1758-1834) as a 3-greats-grandfather on my mom's side and a 4-greats-grandfather on my dad's side. This is one of the relationships that makes them third cousins once removed. Very likely Klaas Johann Siemens passed the same piece (or several pieces) of DNA to me via both my dad and my mom. If I have a DNA match with another of his descendants, it looks as though we are much more closely related than we really are because I am getting DNA from two paths from Klaas Johan Siemens, not just the normal one path from one parent. And then when you have several of these kind of relationships in your ancestry, it really starts to add up.
So someone who appears to be a 2nd cousin based on the amount of shared DNA might really be a 4th or 5th cousin or even more distant. In fact, I have a number of matches that are supposed to be 1st and 2nd cousins (based on DNA testing) whom I know are NOT actually 1st and 2nd cousins. It would require the testing of many, many cousins (probably dozens or scores of cousins) to untangle all these relationships.
In my personal case, I tested at 23andMe in 2012, and I think it was a waste of money. I also uploaded my results for free to Gedmatch. Neither produced any genealogical results.
There is one case where atDNA would be useful for someone of Low German Mennonite descent. If you are searching for a recent ancestor, say a parent, grandparent, or great-grandparent, then it would be worth doing. This would occur in cases of adoption, recent non-paternal events, or if your family has lost information about the most recent generations. You will still get results that show matches who are supposedly more closely related than they actually are. But these are easier to work through for recent generations. And you may not have any other good options for doing research.
In the comments please share your experiences, positive and negative, with atDNA.
Searching for Clusters of First Names
Sometimes you are searching for someone with a complicated or easily-misunderstood surname, he can be really hard to find. His surname can be spelled so many different ways.
For example, last night I was searching in the census records at Ancestry.com for an Ezra Lorenz whom I knew had lived in Durham, Kansas. My only result was an Edward Lawrence from New Jersey. I tried different spellings of Lorenz. I tried his wife Sara Lorenz, which didn't help either. I tried his son Clarence - no luck.
But this morning I tried my last-ditch strategy: I searched for all the first names that I knew in the family without the surname because first names are less-likely to be garbled. My search parameters were
First Name - Ezra
Born - 1884
Spouse - Sara
Child - Alvina
Child - Clarence
Child - Pearl
Child - Vernedda
Location - Marion County, Kansas
And immediately the results popped up with all their census records. When I looked at the 1920 census, I saw why my original search didn't work - the handwriting was very sloppy, and he had been indexed as "Ozra Leonz." His wife was indexed as "Kate" and the children as "Athena," "Clarence," "Pearly," and "Beatric." Somehow these were close enough for the Ancestry search engine to find the family.
I think this works because first names are more likely to be correctly transcribed and because there were no other clusters of identical first names. I found my grandfather on a very messy page of the 1921 Canadian census this way when I had given up all hope of finding him.
If you're having no luck finding a family, try searching just on all the first names you know and a location.
For example, last night I was searching in the census records at Ancestry.com for an Ezra Lorenz whom I knew had lived in Durham, Kansas. My only result was an Edward Lawrence from New Jersey. I tried different spellings of Lorenz. I tried his wife Sara Lorenz, which didn't help either. I tried his son Clarence - no luck.
But this morning I tried my last-ditch strategy: I searched for all the first names that I knew in the family without the surname because first names are less-likely to be garbled. My search parameters were
First Name - Ezra
Born - 1884
Spouse - Sara
Child - Alvina
Child - Clarence
Child - Pearl
Child - Vernedda
Location - Marion County, Kansas
And immediately the results popped up with all their census records. When I looked at the 1920 census, I saw why my original search didn't work - the handwriting was very sloppy, and he had been indexed as "Ozra Leonz." His wife was indexed as "Kate" and the children as "Athena," "Clarence," "Pearly," and "Beatric." Somehow these were close enough for the Ancestry search engine to find the family.
I think this works because first names are more likely to be correctly transcribed and because there were no other clusters of identical first names. I found my grandfather on a very messy page of the 1921 Canadian census this way when I had given up all hope of finding him.
If you're having no luck finding a family, try searching just on all the first names you know and a location.
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