Dutch/Russian Mennonites

[Ernie]

This is a thread to learn more about Dutch/Russian Mennonites.

We look forward to our own Neto and others helping us learn about this segment of the Anabaptist world.

[Ernie]

I'm trying to understand the ethnicities of Dutch/Russian Mennonites and how language evolved with this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Mennonites
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plautdietsch

I learned some from these sites but still have questions.

The first site says this.

The Mennonites of Dutch origin were joined by Mennonites from other parts of Europe, including the German-speaking parts of the Swiss Confederacy.

If this is the case, why are the last names in Russian Mennonite communities different from Swiss last names?

Dutch/Russian Mennonite folks have different facial features than Swiss/Germans. Why is this if there were Swiss who also joined them?

Did people from Poland and Prussia also join them? Did Ukrainians and Russians join the Mennonite church in Ukraine?

I'm guessing that most Swiss/German Mennonites have 100% Swiss/German blood due to how segregated they have kept themselves.
Do many Dutch/Russian Mennonites have 100% Dutch blood?

No racial undertones in these questions. I am fond of cross-cultural interactions and am fine with bi-racial marriages.
Just curious about what actually happened in the Dutch/Russian Mennonite saga.

[JohnH]

I can only speak for some parts of the Russian Mennonite legacy (calling it "Dutch", whilst academic, is something very, very few people identify as; if you ask any of my relatives, they will tell you they aren't Dutch at all, but are certainly Russian Mennonites).

People used to prefer to marry within their own group, particularly by dialect. Some came from what is now Flanders and others from what is Friesland. In the 1600s, not everyone had surnames, but eventually they had to come up with one. Sometimes people picked a surname based on where they were from.

The Flemish side of Russian Mennonites and the Frisian side did not intermarry even after migrating to Prussia (what is now Poland) and Russia (what was for a few decades Ukraine, and is now administered by Russia again). This custom persisted even into Kansas and Manitoba.

Intermarriage between them became more common in the 1960s, at least from the genealogical records I have looked at.

You can access virtually all Russian Mennonite ancestry at "Grandma Online", by the way. The data is nearly complete.

I have not seen any Swiss ancestry at all nor have I found much evidence of Swiss customs. The ways of Swiss background Mennonites and Amish indeed seem quite alien to Russian Mennonites. They just do things differently and think differently. (Now, for that matter, so do Flemish and Frisian background people.)

[Ken]

I'm guessing that most Swiss/German Mennonites have 100% Swiss/German blood due to how segregated they have kept themselves.

I don't know anything about Dutch/Russian Mennonites. But a lot of Swiss/German Mennonites have some French ancestry as there were Mennonites immigrating from the Alsace-Lorraine region of northern France which traded hands back and forth between France and Germany. At that time it was part of France under Louis XV. Most were probably German-speakers but they were French citizens (or subjects) living in Northeast France.
That region was conquered and annexed by Germany in 1871 after the Franco Prussian war. But at the time that most Swiss/German Mennonites were immigrating to North America in the 1700s, Germany was not yet a country but rather a collection of smaller principalities under the Holy Roman Empire.

[barnhart]

Edsel Burge in the latest Anabaptist perspectives podcast answered the question of how the Swiss brothers became known as Mennonites even though the two movements were independent and diverse. After the 30 years war the Palatinate region was depleted of people to work the land so the local landholder invited the Anabaptists from up the Rhine e settle and called them Mennonites because Anabaptistism was forbidden by the empire but the Dutch Mennonites were respected because of their prosperity.

[R7ehr]

I'm trying to understand the ethnicities of Dutch/Russian Mennonites and how language evolved with this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Mennonites
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plautdietsch

I learned some from these sites but still have questions.

The first site says this.

The Mennonites of Dutch origin were joined by Mennonites from other parts of Europe, including the German-speaking parts of the Swiss Confederacy.

If this is the case, why are the last names in Russian Mennonite communities different from Swiss last names?

There probably was very few Swiss that joined them, or else they joined them only temporarily.

(I learned last week that my ancestor was born in Switzerland, just down the road from Jacob Amann and my ancestor joined the Amish church there. Until last week, I only knew as far back as the Alsace-Lorraine country, which was after Switzerland.)

[Neto]

Whether, as some mid-1800's Mennonite historians thought, Dutch "baptism-mindedness" (doopsgezinden) primarily got its early start from influences from a small group of Valdenses, or originated from Swiss Brethren who had come from the Swiss areas, no one really knows - probably both. But we do know that it took hold among two main groups of people, speakers of Frisian, and Flemish. Not only did they speak different dialects of Dutch, but also differed in cultural ways that remained as distinctive practices in church life until fairly recently, and perhaps even today, in some areas.

Mennonite family names:
Netherlands was controlled by the Spanish in the early years, and it was also during that time period that surnames were required for the first time. Some people paid fair sums of money to acquire what they considered more favorable names, while the poor were sometimes given derogatory names. The persecutions against Jews in Spain & Portugal brought many Sephardim (Jews of North-African origin or descent) to the Low Countries. As a result of either those naming laws, or actual ethnic intermarriage, there are quite a few shared surnames between Jews and Mennonites (including my own two closest surnames, those of both my father and mother's families).

[I have encountered only two common names between Swiss Brethren and Plautdietsch people groups (more on this name in the next paragraph): Barkman, and Funk, the latter being rather rare among the Swiss. I have married in relatives of both of these names, none of which have any know ties to Amish, or to (as we called them) 'The Old Mennonites".]

Language development:
Many of the Dutch Mennonites (or, as they were called by some friendly elites of the greater Dutch culture, ‘Menists’) had fled their home lands already by the 1530’s or so, settling in what is now Poland. (I’m a bit fuzzy on some of these facts, but I think that the first refugees settled in the Danzig area, and later others made their home in a German speaking area known as Prussia. Those who settled in cities maintained ties to the ‘motherland’ much longer than the farmers who settled in the countryside. The former continued speaking Dutch (as well as their ‘familiar dialect’) much longer, while the others adapted to the dominant language, one now referred to as ‘Middle Low German’. Dutch remained the language of the church for the city group, and perhaps due to Luther’s Bible translation efforts, German took over as the language of the church for the others. Gradually ‘real’ Low German was influenced by the two major Dutch dialects, and this formed what is commonly called ‘Mennonite Low German’, or, to use the name in the language itself, Plautdietsch. (Pronounced as ‘plawt deetsch’. – ‘dee’ as in the English word deep.)

Migrations – Welcome and then Unwanted
The area of present day Poland where they settled had suffered severe population decimation previously, and former farmland had returned to swamp land. So the Dutch, with their abilities and experience with building dikes and windmills, were given swamp land, which they restored to productive farmland. When they (perhaps like the ‘Children of Jacob’ in Egypt) grew greatly in numbers and wealth, they became unwelcome, so the invitation from the German princess who had married the Russian Czar, ‘Katherine the Great’ came at an opportune time, and they accepted the task of settling the Steepes of what is now south central Ukraine. The first colony was made up of mostly very poor people, and it was called Kortitza, sometimes now referred to as “the Old Colony”. (This is where my mother’s family all came from.) Not long after, a second colony was formed to the south west of Kortitza (or Chortitza), called Molotschna. (This is where my father’s family all came from.) There were various other colonies formed from these two, some in Siberia, and I’ll also mention the one in Crimia, because a second Mennonite Brethren group formed in that colony, called the Kriemer Mennonite Brethren. The first church split formed as the Kleine Gemeinde – ‘the small remnant’. (Most of the Plautdietsch people who have ‘crossed over’ into the Swiss Brethren groups have this background. There is a BMA congregation south east of Oklahoma City this is probably a majority of KG people, most of whom have history in Mexico, after leaving Canada over the right to have their own schools. I have also ‘met’ – through my business, over the telephone with a number of folks who are now members of various independent Mennonite congregations in Kentucky, groups I call ‘conservative’ or even ‘Old Order’ Beachy Amish-Mennonite. However, at least one of these congregations originated from ‘Church-House Amish from Virginia.)

I kind of got off-topic there, but the last massive migration started in 1874, with some entire congregations moving first to Kansas, then Nebraska, and on to Minnesota, the Dakotas, and to western Canada as well. (My own ancestors all settled in Kansas and Nebraska, between 1874 and 1890 or 91. Many claimed land in Oklahoma Territory in the land runs. My paternal grandfather was born in OT. My mother’s grandfather claimed land in OT, but moved to what had been Indian Territory soon after statehood. That is where I grew up, in my mother’s community.)

[My parents were often mistreated or beaten by school classmates during time of WWII, and this was one of the reasons they did not teach Plautdietsch to us. The fact that they spoke slightly different dialects of Plautdietsch may have also influenced this decision.]

When I first came to Holmes County, I assumed that the language, ethnic, and cultural elements pretty much summed up the differences between ‘your people’ and ‘my people’. I continue to be surprised by some of the varying doctrinal and ‘church attitude’ variations, so that I no longer make assumptions. My wife & I (she having grown up in an Amish home) walk this path together. (The MB church is no longer what I experienced, having largely, I will say, become ‘Evangelicals’. There certainly are ‘remnants’ of the old MB way of life, culture, and doctrine, but it has not resulted in any splits, so it is not readily apparent to people from groups who have divided into separately recognizable groups. (Oh, I mentioned the KMB’s above – they merged with the MB’s in around 1960 or 64. With this merger the MB’s changed their early insistence on baptism by immersion only, which I think hindered cooperation with other Mennonites for that first 100 years of existence.)

Any errors here are my responsibility - I typed this up from memory, without looking at any outside sources.)

[Ernie]

Thanks Neto.

So Russian Mennonites as a whole have nearly 100% Dutch ancestry?

[Neto]

Thanks Neto.

So Russian Mennonites as a whole have nearly 100% Dutch ancestry?

In family research my Dad did for our family, the trail ends with a Buller listed as born in Switzerland. Due to the persecutions and resulting social upheaval of that time, this may or may not mean that he was Swiss. Other historians list the Buller name as Frisian (Dutch). There is also the fact that the 'true' Dutch people are light haired and light skinned. On two different occasions missionary coworkers who were either Dutch-born immigrants to Canada (or their parents) when I said that I am Dutch, have said "Oh, you are the 'Black Dutch'." As I mentioned in the part about surnames, there were many Sephardim who moved to the Low Countries in the very late 1400's. It is possible that some of these became believers during those early years. (Out of one fire into another....) My mom had jet-black hair when she was young, as did her father. Her maiden name is the name of a Chocolate producer in Poland, and that family is Jewish. My Mom's older brother had such a Jewish appearance that Jews would sometimes argue with him, insisting that he had to be a Jew. There were also people of Polish ethnicity who joined the Mennonites during the years they were living there in Prussia (now Poland).

Back to my own surname - Buller. It is also possible that this family name came from English refugees who fled their own country for religious freedom in the Netherlands. (A ship sat in the harbor for some months, with the Dutch authorities refusing to allow the passengers to come ashore. Menno Simons went out to the ship and food and other supplies were given to the people. They were later allowed to disembark, and while most returned to their own country, being unwilling to accept non-resistance, but some did stay.) The Buller name is somewhat common in England (General Redvers Buller, the commanding officer in the Boer War) and in other former British colonies: Buller River runs through Buller Gorge in Buller Province in New Zealand, and Australia has Buller Mountain.

One of my G. G. G. grandfathers, Gotleib Boese (his daughter is my common ancestor with John 'Denver' - Deutschendorf) is said to have been found as an abandoned infant in the colony in Russia, and raised by a Mennonite family. He could have been a child of a Ukrainian, a Russian, or of a Tatar. There were also intermarriages with German Lutherans and with Jews during the years in the Russian Empire.

It was, as you know, forbidden to baptize Russian Orthodox people, and those who did were arrested and put in prison. I cannot say anything about my own family except that they are all Plautdietsch as far back as we can trace with any confidence. That is, among our people, considered a 'new ethnicity'.

[Ernie]

It is also possible that this family name came from English refugees who fled their own country for religious freedom in the Netherlands. (A ship sat in the harbor for some months, with the Dutch authorities refusing to allow the passengers to come ashore. Menno Simons went out to the ship and food and other supplies were given to the people. They were later allowed to disembark, and while most returned to their own country, being unwilling to accept non-resistance, but some did stay.)

I don't know anything about this story. English refugees? Holland refused to let them stay because they were not non-resistant?