Finished!!! Abraham F. Reimer Diary

I just finished translating the Abraham F. Reimer #3945 (1808-1892) diary for the years 1870-1874. It's been a year-long project, and I've enjoyed it. My German translation skills have improved, and I've learned a lot about how our ancestors lived in Russia.

I've uploaded the file to Google Drive, and I'm including a link here. Feel free to download it and to pass it on. I included a list of all people in the diary and their GM numbers and a list of vital events to make it easier for genealogists to use.

A Polish Mennonite

There have been ethnically Polish Mennonites for centuries.  That's where surnames such as Rogalsky, Sawatsky, Tilitsky, and Petkau come from.  Their forefathers were ethnic Poles, almost certainly Catholic, who became Mennonites in the 18th century or earlier.  But very few ethnic Poles have become Mennonites in North America.  One of those was John Glen #319928 (1864-1939), who joined the Kleine Gemeinde near Jansen, Nebr., having been baptized in 1891.

I came across him because he was friends with my grandparents, Cornelius #7529 (1884-1950) and Margaret Siemens; and his life intrigued me because as a Polish convert in Nebraska he was not a typical KG member.  Although he had children, none of them had any children; so he has left no descendants to research him and to preserve his memory.  So I have taken that task for myself; and he has proven to be quite an interesting, if elusive, person.

First, I decided to find his immigration record, but that proved to be a fruitless search, even with the search capabilities of Ancestry.com.  I also checked the Mennonite immigrant lists in Clarence Hiebert's book Brothers in Deed, Brothers in Need: A Scrapbook About Mennonite Immigrants from Russia, 1870-1885 and David Haury's book Index to Mennonite Immigrants on United States Passenger Lists, 1872-1904 but found nothing.  I suspected that I didn't have his Polish name and that "John Glen" was an Americanized version and that he had used his Polish name when he arrived.

So then I decided to narrow it down by finding his year of immigration in the census records.  But he reported variously that he had immigrated in 1874, 1884 (mentioned twice), 1885, and 1886.  That didn't help much.  But I did note that he said he had been naturalized, mentioning 1913 twice and 1915 once.

So I decided to look for his naturalization record since it should give his immigration date.  If either of the two years of naturalization was correct, he should have been living near Meade, Kans., since the Kleine Gemeinde had migrated there as a group in 1908.  When I searched in Ancestry, I found an index card for him in Meade, Kans., on 28 October 1913.

Naturalization index card for John Glen, 28 October 1913, Western District Court of Missouri, ARC: 572253; Records of District Courts of the United States, Record Group 21; National Archives at Kansas City, Missouri, accessed at Ancestry.com on 5 November 2016.

His naturalization card gave me a month of arrival (March 1884) and a port (New York City).  Fortunately, there were only two passenger ships that arrived in New York City in March 1884.  But Ancestry still couldn't find him with an automated search, so I browsed the records individually.  With only two ships, that was doable.

It took a while, but I came across a "Jan Glein" traveling in a group of 24 single men, mostly young, from Hungary, who arrived on 3 March 1884, on board the S.S. California from Hamburg.  The Kingdom of Hungary was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at that time, so that fit the fact on the naturalization card that he had been a subject or resident of Austria. But he gave an age of 24, meaning that he would have been born in 1859-1860, while the naturalization card gave a birth date of 10 May 1864.  But no one else on those two ships was even close, and enough of the facts fit so that I concluded it was probably he. 

Here is his name from the passenger manifest:

Passenger Jan Glein, Passenger Manifest of Vessels Arriving New York City, 3 March 1884, ship California, page 2, line 61.  Accessed at Ancestry.com on 2 December 2016.

Later I found him in the 1885 census records in Nebraska but not in the 1880 census records anywhere in the US (using the Ancestry search).  I also went manually through the entire 1880 Jefferson County, Nebr., census records, since that is where he was in 1885, but didn't find him.  So that was another piece of evidence that he arrived between 1880 and 1885.

I was so excited that I had manged to track down a single individual who changed his name shortly after arrival!  But of course, I wanted to find out who his parents were.

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.

Do You Really Need That Marriage Registration?

On 18 February 1890, my great-grandmother Aganetha (Klassen) Janzen Siemens #6465 (1848-1890) died of puerperal fever.  She left behind a grieving husband who now had to care for seven children ranging in age from newborn to twelve years.  Understandably my great-grandfather Gerhard T. Siemens #6463 (1834-1908) remarried quickly, on 13 July 1890, to a widow Maria (Peters) Rempel #7038 (1847 - 1930) in Rosenhoff, Manitoba.

The question - should I research anything about his re-marriage?  After all, this new wife was not my direct ancestor.  In fact, she's not even a collateral relative.  You do have to draw the line somewhere about what you are going to resarch, but I think this is not the place for several reasons.

First, any marriage is an important event in the life of a person.  My great-grandfather lived with Maria Peters for eighteen years before he died, so it affected him greatly that he married her.  Since my grandfather Cornelius K. Siemens was five years old when his mother died, the new wife was really the mother who raised him.  Second, it's a vital event (birth, baptism, marriage, death, burial) that I want to document for every ancestor, even if this particular marriage was not the one to which my grandfather was born.  Finally, and most importantly, there can be some critical information on the marriage registration.  So let's look at how to find the marriage registration and the details of the document.

A searchable index to Manitoba vital records, beginning in 1882, is online here.  When I searched for the marriage, this is the index entry that I found:

Gerhard Siemens and Maria Peters marriage registration index, 13 July 1890, no. 1890-001447, Vital Statistics Agency, Winnipeg, Manitoba.  Accessed online at http://vitalstats.gov.mb.ca/DetailView.php on 3 October 2016.

This gives proof of the fact of their marriage and the date.  At this point, you could be pleased with what you found and think there is no more information on the original and stop.  And sometimes you would be right.  But in this case it would be a big mistake.

For a mere 12 CAD, you can order a copy of the original, which I did.  And Saturday it showed up in my (snail) mailbox.  There were no great revelations on it, but there were some interesting facts.  First, here is the document:

Gerhard Siemens and Maria Peters marriage registration, married 13 July 1890, Rosenhoff, Manitoba, registered 4 August 1890, Vital Statistics Agency, Winnipeg, Manitoba, p. 269.

Note how much more information is on the original.  Here are some of the interesting things.

His Parents
Gerhard's parents' full names are given.  In fact, this is the only document I have found that gives his mother's maiden name, Gertruda Thiesen.   I have a church register that gives his father's wife's maiden name, but the church register doesn't say that that husband and wife are Gerhard's father or mother, so I have to use other documents to demonstrate that connection.  So this marriage registration is my only direct connection between Gerhard and his mother.

Her Parents
Maria Peters' parents were previously unknown in the Grandma database.  But here it says they are Jacob Peters and Katarina Heidebrecht.

I'm not really interested in her parents, but it might help someone else if I submit this correction to the Grandma database.

Maria Peters, #7038, Genealogical Registry and Database of Mennonite Ancestry as updated July 2016, California Mennonite Historical Society, Fresno, California.  Accessed online at http://www.grandmaonline.org/GW-asp-2/GWIndividual.asp?Ind=7038 on 3 October 2016.

No parents are listed in the screenshot above, so I submitted a correction by clicking on the button circled in red.  Of course, I searched for her parents in the database first, but I wasn't sure that I found them.  There was a Jacob Peters #53094 married to a Katharina _____ #53097 who might be her parents, but they don't have a child Maria listed in the database.  And I couldn't find that they had a child Maria in the Molotschna school records.  So I added my hunch as a note to the correction that I submitted.  Hopefully this will help some of Maria Peters' descendants someday.  (For someone who wants to pursue this family, Maria wrote a letter to the Mennonitische Rundschau that was published on 6 March 1895, in which she lists many of her relatives and either implores them for a letter or thanks them for having communicated.)

Witnesses
The two witnesses to the marriage are interesting as both are former in-laws!  Heinrich L. Friesen was the brother-in-law of Gerhard's previous wife, Aganetha Klassen.  And Jacob Rempel was the brother of Maria's previous husband.  There must not have been animosity with the in-laws since in-laws were witnesses to the marriage.  On the contrary, the in-laws likely were happy that a bereaved spouse had found a partner and someone to care for each one's children.

Minister
I have long had a question about what church Gerhard was a member of after about 1880.  He was a member of the Kleine Gemeinde to that point, but shortly after that, the KG suffered a major split where their elder and a third to a half of their members left and joined the Holdemans.  Gerhard's oldest stepson, Isaac DeVeer, did join the Holdemans, and several of his children and stepchildren joined  the Sommerfelder.  Did Gerhard leave the KG?  I haven't found any record either way until now.

But the minister who married them, Johann K. Friesen, was a KG minister according to the Grandma database (#3777), so it appears that Gerhard did not leave for the Holdemans and was still KG.

So I hope that I have demonstrated that it is worth finding the original for every marriage of your ancestors, not just the marriage between your direct ancestors. 

How Do You Know What to Believe?

The Grandma database said that my great-great-grandmother, Katharina Bergman #7126 (1834-1916) died in Jansen, Nebraska.  She was a member of the Kleine Gemeinde church, which had lived there until 1908, when they moved to Meade, Kansas.  Since the church moved en masse, I doubted that she would have stayed behind, especially since she was an elderly lady of 74 when they moved.  So I was skeptical of her death location in Grandma.  On the other hand, she could have been on a trip back to Jansen to visit relatives when she died, so you never know.

Katharina Bergman, Genealogical Registry and Database of Mennonite Ancestry, CD-ROM, version 6 (Fresno:  California Mennonite Historical Society, 2013), individual #7126.

My grandmother also kept a family register in which she recorded the death of Katharina Bergman, who was her grandmother.  The entry (original below) says, “1916 25 Nov ist Groszmutter gestorben bei Jak. Reimers Meade Kan (25 Nov 1916 Grandmother died at Jacob Reimers, Meade, Kansas).”   

Margaretha H. Reimer, Freundschaft Register Buch [Relatives Register Book], (Fowler, Kansas: unpublished, begun in 1923) 6.  Original held by Anna (Siemens) Fast, Hillsboro, Kansas.

Since my grandmother was 21 years old at the time and since her grandmother died at Jacob Reimers, her uncle’s house, she surely knew where it had happened.  But I wanted some more proof.  So I ordered her death certificate from the State of Kansas.

And here is the death certificate from Logan Township, Meade County, Kansas:

Katherina Barkmann death certificate, died 25 November 1916, dated 27 November 1916, no. 60219, Office of Vital Statistics, Topeka, Kansas.

It’s pretty hard to dispute the location of death on a contemporary death certificate.  So my grandmother’s family register was right – Katharina Bergman did die near Meade, Kansas, and NOT near Jansen, Nebraska.  I have no idea how the wrong death place got into Grandma.

Some lessons to draw from this - 

1) It is critical to check the original source.  

2) We need to evaluate the likely accuracy of sources.  A secondary database such as Grandma is only as accurate as the unknown person who supplied the information.   My grandmother's family register - since she was likely a witness of the event - is a good source.  But a contemporary death certificate signed by a doctor and an informant is a very strong source.  

3) It pays to think about whether a piece of information is reasonable or not - in this case it was unlikely that an elderly widow would have stayed behind when the whole church moved.