Soloist wrote: ↑Wed Nov 08, 2023 11:50 am
Neto wrote: ↑Tue Nov 07, 2023 9:18 pm
Within their districts or colonies, villages were to be created in which families received equal allotments of land in perpetuity. Each village had between 20 and 30 farmsteads (Wirtschaften). These could not be divided or sold, but only inherited by the youngest son in perpetuity.
A district also had reserve land for future villages according to population growth, or to be rented, e.g., for sheep grazing. Every village was also required to set aside 1/6 of their land as surplus for other housing (e.g., the old and retired) and trades. Because older sons did not inherit a farm, a father was responsible to prepare them for other vocations needed to create whole communities.
Wife: So I’m a little bit confused by this article, at least the part where it said the youngest son would inherit the land. I was just listening to an audio book the other day called, The Earth is Round, about a family moving with their colony to Manitoba, and obviously, that’s a fiction novel, but it seemed like the eldest son would be the one who inherited the land. One of the reasons that many people wanted to move to Canada was so the landless ones would actually be able to own land, and then of course, to keep from being drafted. I did like how they seemed to show the good and the bad side of the Russian Mennonites at that time, and not just either completely tear them down or make them seem like saints.They also talked about how non-landowners were not allowed to go to meetings or vote about different things, and some of the class inequality among the colonies, although the entire colony worked together to pay off everybody’s debts before moving, so no one who wanted to go would be left behind.
So basically, I’m just asking whether or not the article or the book were correct about who inherited the land in the Russian colonies.
Very good question, and I wondered the same thing. However, in the case of my dad's family, it WAS in fact the youngest who got the farm. But there were other factors involved, because my dad, the eldest of the boys, and also of all of the siblings, felt a call to the ministry, so he and my mom did not stay in that area very long after marriage. (Dad first attended Rio Grande Bible Institute, then they moved to Fresno, CA, and he attended the Fresno Junior College, as well as Pacific Bible Institute, a school operated by the MB conference.) He 'candidated' at a number of MB congregations during his final year at PBI, but not having received a call from any of them, we (I was born there during that final year) moved back to Oklahoma, to my mom's community. Dad never did take a pastorate, but he DID teach SS for well over 50 years. He only stopped when Alzheimer's had taken so much from him that he could no longer keeps his thoughts together. Sorry for getting off on those details, but that may be why Dad, as the eldest son, did not get the farm.
The other factor is that Dad had a severe case of 'hay fever', so he may have really wanted to avoid farming. Also, my Grandpa was only 46 when my folks got married, the point at which Dad might have taken over the farm. After dad, the next son was born quite a bit later, after most of Dad's sisters. Then the next two sons went to college, the first of the two for education (HS level), and the last son for agriculture. Neither of these last two married young like my dad, and the youngest (about 11 years older than I, the third son in our family) moved back home and worked with Grandpa & Grandma on the farm, as well as doing other full-time work at the grain elevator in the small town nearby. My Grandpa died at 68 years of age, when my youngest uncle was only 26, then newly married. He was still working full-time at a service station, plus helping on the farm. I was 17 at that time, and I worked on the farm for the next two summers, the first year working for Grandma, then the second year working for my uncle.
So while I do not think there was any Czarist law that said that the farm MUST go to the youngest son, I suspect that it was often the case. I also do not think there were any stipulations like that on the part of the Mennonite church. I think that the age and health of the father was generally the determining factor. (As far as sons-in-law are concerned, the older three sisters married Mennonite men from other areas of the country, two in California, and one in Kansas. The other two aunts never married, one taking a career in the alumni office of a Bible institute in Nebraska, and the other a teaching career in an English school in Mexico, then later in the public school system in Oklahoma.) So a lot of it is just logistics.
Congregation: Gospel Haven Mennonite Fellowship, Benton, Ohio (Holmes Co.) a split from Beachy-Amish Mennonite.
Personal heritage & general theological viewpoint: conservative Mennonite Brethren.