A Book That Speaks (Part II)

In my last post, I shared a bit about a book that I received.  Now I'm going to tell you why the book is so special to me.

First, when I opened the cover, I saw that my grandfather, Cornelius Siemens, stamped his name in the book in red, so it's a nice memory from him.  It's actually the only thing that I have from him.  He died in 1950, twenty-one years before I was born.  Plus, he had 26 grandchildren, and I was born second-to-last, so all his things had been divided long before I was around. 

 But when I got to the back of the book, I was amazed.  The book was signed by Cornelius Janzen #6468 (1848-1873) of Neukirch, Molotschna Colony, Russia, in 1866.  He's not my relative, so why should I care?  Because he was the first husband of my great-grandmother Aganetha Klassen.  They married in about 1871, and he died suddenly in March 1873 at age 25.

He signed the book at age 18, which is about the age that he would have been baptized.  Probably, it was an influential book in his spiritual growth as he matured into adulthood.  He was a school teacher also, so he would have been respected as an intellectual as well.

But how did the book come to my grandfather?  Presumably my great-grandmother Aganetha kept the book after her husband died.  She re-married four months later, in July 1873, to my great-grandfather Gerhard Siemens.  And the book must have been important enough for her to bring it as one of a few possessions that would have fit into their trunk of freight when they immigrated to Canada in August 1874.  And then my grandfather Cornelius Siemens was born in 1884 in Manitoba.

The next notation in the book is that it is a gift from to my grandfather with wishes from his parents in 1890.  The date 1890 is significant because that is when my great-grandmother Aganetha died in childbirth.  So the book was a memory saved for my grandfather Cornelius from his mother - he was only 5 years old when she died.

And then my grandfather signed his name in the back of the book.

Not only is this a memory of my grandfather whom I never met - it's a memory of my great-grandmother and of her first husband.  It's a memory of what spiritual life was like in Russia for them.  When I hold the book, I hold something that was dear to my great-grandmother.  The book was surely a bittersweet memory for her, a memory of the man she loved in her youth and a memory of how he was taken from her all too soon.

Cornelius Janzen left no descendants, but when I hold this book, I count myself a spiritual and intellectual descendant of his.

Update on 1776 Census Project

I've been working on a project to identify all the Fasts in the 1776 census of Mennonites in West Prussia.  Glenn Penner's extraction of the data is found here.  My theory was that one or both of the parents of my earliest known Fast ancestor, Gerhard Fast #660202 (1739-1829) might be listed in that census, and I wouldn't even have known about it.  His oldest known sibling was born ABT 1737 - if his parents were about 20 years old when their first child was born, they might have been born about 1717.  Thus in 1776, they would have been about 60 years old.

There were 31 Fast families listed in the 1776 census, and 11 of them had previously been identified in Grandma.  I was able to identify 11 more Fasts, so now 22 of the 31 are identified in GM.

My methodology was to look for them first in GM.  Then I checked my spreadsheet in which I have extracted 431 individual records over the years from the Mennonite, Lutheran/Evangelical, and Catholic church books to see if I could find the person.  I checked the Mennonite church books that Andreas Riesen extracted.  I checked the 1772 and 1789 census, the immigration records to Russia in BH Unruh, Peter Rempel, and that I have gotten from the Prussian archives in Berlin, and the land records that Glenn Penner has posted online.

Unfortunately, none of the Fasts whom I was able to identify were old enough to be the parents of my Gerhard.  There are 3-4 Fasts whom I could not identify who lived in the Gross Werder and are potential candidates to be Gerhard's parents, but I found no information to identify them.  I was able to tie many, many children to the 22 identified Fast families, so I've added a lot to the store of knowledge about the Fasts in GM, so it's been a useful exercise.  But I didn't accomplish the goal that I set out to achieve.

I'm planning a trip to Poland in 1-2 years to do research in the archives there, and this work was a necessary prelude to that trip.  I wouldn't want to make an expensive trip to the Polish archives without having done everything that I could with data that is available to me while sitting at home.

I'll post the spreadsheet with my results in the near future, but I need to clean up the spreadsheet first.