All sides of this genome detail "New" Mennonites from the rural "Old.” The first urban New Mennonites, Grandfather Jacob L. Reiff and his son Howard R. Reiff, were members of First Mennonite of Philadelphia, but both had been "Old." Their move to the city began them with the "New," but any philosophical differences came at the insistence of Howard's wife Anna, Anna Bechtel Mack (1880-1970), with much deliberation, since she came of a family deep in Mennonite pastors and bishops. By the time of Anna’s discrimination, her father, Henry Mack, had begun a butter and egg business in the city (1906) and both Reiff and Mack families, who had known each other in the country worshiped together, leaving letters and documents of significance. Nineteenth century events underlay subsequent attitudes in the 20th, public school, choosing ministers by lot (or not), plain dress of clergy, advancing age, growing use of English, mechanical innovation (Good, 13-14).
Beyond Reformed or Mennonite, a powerful influence concerns the unity of the maternal families with their husbands. These are notable. Harry Reiff considers that Hans George's Maria was the educated daughter of a Reformed church minion in the old world. Their names throughout the generations resonate with significance, Landis, Hendricks, Rosenberger, Mack, Yeo. These issues are undertaken below.
They gave my name I think to honor Andrew S. Mack (1836-1917), the only other Andrew (Andreas) of the immediate generations. Grandmother Anna had taken refuge with him as a child. A cabinet maker, farmer, stone puller and Mennonite Bishop, letters of the events of his life from 1870-1906 remain.
Anna and her daughter Anna Elizabeth (Mack Reiff) Young are the common denominators of most of the discoveries narrated here. Folk art and English prejudice impacted both of them early. Anna got a sixth grade education and then had to work the farm. Desperate to escape, with an innate sense of idealism and duty, she outdid in serendipity. Her attic held a collection of books and linens beyond exaggeration, the kind you read of in Van Allen Bradley. I went to possess that estate Christmas night, 2004, arrived at dawn to find examples from the library of her great grandfather, Abraham Bechtel, grandmother, Mary Longacre Bechtel and her grandfather, John B. Bechtel in a bookcase signed and inscribed.
What luck to have Mennonite bishops on both sides of her family! Naturally the books were in German, which doubled their significance, but doubling from there, they were found with the embroidered linens of four generations of her husband's mother's family, Catherine G. Rosenberger (1857-1883), whose mother Margaret Gehman (1833-1860), orphaned her daughter at age six. Margaret and her husband, John S. Rosenberger (1824-1861) passed in their youth, leaving two daughters, but the show towels and linens back to 1772 in Anna's trunks were preserved. The Rosenbergers here
A child senses patterns only after, if at all, though in some cases patterns are imposed before. My contemplation of this world began in oil paintings I saw stored above a wardrobe in the attic of this grandmother when I used to sleep on visits from the age of four. Floating on oceanic memories the background of these paintings emerged only in the final years of my aunt Elizabeth's life. She was the artist who did the paintings, the oils, but, as discovered later, full sheets of watercolors and wood blocks existed, hand drawings with notebooks too, explaining some with sketches. In the peculiar nature of surrounding contradictions, I had to find first in my own hand what was revealed in hers, that is, half a century later, which seems a principle overall, that you can only know another in yourself when you do. This almost seems like destiny.
If destiny it cannot be escaped. Late in life that watercolorist got out two books of ledgers of the period 1870-1900 kept by her grandfather Henry S. Mack detailing his life as a farmer in Clayton and his marriage and courtship of Elizabeth Bechtel. In that attic Henry's and Elizabeth's Mennonite songbooks were signed, side by side, with a copy of Henry's inventory of graves of the Old Hereford Mennonite Cemetery documenting the births and deaths of more than 600 Mennonites of the Hereford Mennonite Church of Bally, PA: Record of Tombstone Inscriptions / Old Mennonite Cemetery of the Hereford Congregation of Mennonites (1934).
A third Mack brother emerged, Peter S. Mack (1842-1879), pastor of the Zion Lutheran Church of Hummelstown, PA, and parts of his journal, so that written records of all three brothers, lifelong musicians too, were extant. Other boxes contained the postcards of Harvey Mack, Anna's brother, from France, in WW I, when he drove an ambulance, like E. E. Cummings, and then stayed to work as a carpenter in the reconstruction, throwing over his career in the bank to remain a carpenter the rest of his life.
Connected as the result of 250 years of selection from a roster of families including Reiff, Mack, Moyer, Bechtel, Longacre, Stauffer, Rosenberger, Gehman, Clemmer, Lapp, Landis, Schwenk, Bauer, Markley, Dotterer, Clemens, Hendricks, Turner, Hunsicker, Landis, all Pennsylvania German, predominantly Mennonite, every person on this paternal side was conceived of the same ethnic stock and in the same geographical area as that beginning generation from 1717. Their roots entwined with families like themselves and despite their penchant for anonymity, Mennonite self-effacement, names remained in records as land owners, trustees, executors, deacons, ministers within thirty miles of where we were born. For the tenth generation, there are 1024 examples and in the greater families more. What begins with artifacts was all along in the blood.
To follow the trail in the libraries, certain titles reprinted of the 3151 books and almanacs issued in German in America between 1728 and 1830, most in Pennsylvania, were handed down in families, identified by the signatures of their owners. Two dozen books in 1800 was a large number.
Anna Bechtel Mack's family, ministers on both sides, Mennonite except for Peter Mack, brother of Andrew, a Lutheran pastor, include her uncle, Bishop Andrew S. Mack (1836-1917), her great grandfather, minister Abraham Bechtel, his son, Bishop John C. (Clemens) Bechtel (1779-1843), her own grandfather, John B. Bechtel (1807-1889) and John B. Bechtel's grandson, Henry G. Bechtel (b. 1878) ordained at Vincent in 1914. The Bechtels left Anna a collection of books through her grandmother Mary, primarily John B. Bechtel's, Anna's grandfather, especially four from the 1830’s and before.
These I suppose were left nominally to John B. Bechtel's daughter, Elisabeth Longacre Bechtel (1852-1885), which, along with several new testaments, Mennonite song books and catechisms of the 1870’s with Elizabeth's inscription, were found in the attic of her daughter Anna (1880-1970) long after both had died. One has Elisabeth's husband Henry Mack's name stamped in it. Two others are inscribed by her daughter Anna Mack, and even more supurb earlier works have the names of her mother, father and grandfather. They are the professional and devotional books of a pietist minister. Considering that family members were ministers, more than these are presumed to have been held in the greater family’s possession. These were given by Elisabeth Bechtel's mother to her granddaughter Anna to preserve their memory when they were no more. As a first curator in a series this succeeded against all odds. Elizabeth Bechtel died prematurely in 1885.
John B. Bechtel and his wife had eight children. Of those whose deaths are known, five died before their parents, including Elisabeth. Grandmother Mary, who lived until 1898, gave the books as a keepsake to her grand daughter, Anna Bechtel Mack, “on her 21st birthday Anna [also] inherited several hundred dollars from her maternal grandmother” (Anna Elizabeth Reiff, Best Foot Forward, ms). The books were kept by Anna Mack who left them in turn to her daughter, Elizabeth. Why keep them? It is the gift of identity to the future. They slept incognito over a hundred years, were probably not opened much in that time. Better than snapshots, they reveal their past owners’ lives.
The most important name for the provenance of the books is John B. Bechtel, who, as is written on the first free endpaper in both English and German, acquired Johann Arndt’s, Wahren Christenthem Sechs Bucher vom Wahren Christentum…Nebst DessenParadiesgartliein (Four Books Concerning True Christianity), (Philadelphia: Georg W. Mentz und Sohn, 1832.) at the estate sale of his father’s library, , “Bought at the Sale of my dec’d Father Abm. C. Bechtel Nov the 15th 1861 / John B. Bechtel /paid $1.00 / one of the administrators.” “Subscriber /Abraham C. Bechtel / January the 26th 1833" is written on the front pastedown.
The volume that Abraham Bechtel subscribed had two parts bound in one, 941 and 232 pages respectively, 2 copper-engraved title pages with 63 full-page woodcut emblems. It is said to have been the most frequently used devotional book for more than two centuries among Mennonites. Three German editions appeared in Philadelphia and Germantown prior to this one of 1832: Ben Franklin’s (1751), Christopher Saur’s (1765) and one printed by Johann Georg Ritter, 1830.
In mid 18th century Pennsylvania, Lutheran pastor Muhlenberg spoke of Arndt’s book in the same breath as the Bible: “she continued to study her Bible and Arndt’s True Christianity” (The Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg. Translated by Theodore G. Tappert and John W. Doberstein. Camden, Maine: Picton Press. Fortress Press, 1942, 219) and “…take hold of the Holy Bible and True Christianity every day….” A central principle of this book is that there can be an inner life, a thought life, that however must be maintained and sustain
ed by careful continuous meditation of the good. This is made difficult by continual myriads of counterfeit in the mouths of those who profess this very good, but do not have it present in their lives and thoughts. The chief attribute of the good comes in what modern critics, more myriad counterfeits, call the “mystical union.”Perhaps “dreams and visions” better approaches it, but what happens when visions pass? It is pointless to verbally describe the continual reassurance of joy and the confidence that wrestling with nemesis produces. What bridges the feeling, which is everything, with its absence, is faith. Faith does not require feeling, but without feeling where is the faith?
It is as though you wake up one day and suddenly you have an interior life, but interior here means beautiful, good, wholesome, joyful, and you don’t get that naturally. So where does it come from? Nobody knows in the sense that they can tell you. Those who speak of it might betray it, but even poetically expressed, not rationally, the stages offered in analysis are purgation, illumination, and union, which literally mean nothing. But Arndt holds out the fact of this eternal state.
You may wake up one day, but the day is a decade, and suddenly, meaning as sudden as a tree turns from seed to sapling to rough bark, you may have an interior life where miracles, signs and wonders occur, prayers are answered and you are weak as cloth. You might find yourself praying about all kinds of things you’re not supposed to, peaceful deaths, the phone not to ring, or to ring, and a tide of trust carries you out to sea and back to shore as you feel continually rescued.
It sounds presumptuous to claim that this is union with God, an idea impossible to reason because reason requires it be the product of some effort or exercise. The irony that union with God is accomplished solely through union with God, not by effort but effortlessness, is very Arndt, like backing a horse into the stable forwards.
The physicist Heisenberg (The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory. Chicago:The University of Chicago Press, 1930) calls this a problem of language, illustrated also by the dual character of matter and radiation, for “it is obvious that a thing cannot be a form of wave motion and composed of particles at the same time-the concepts are too different” (10-11) What illustrates duality in physics illustrates the beginning and end of unity in Arndt, that is, it is a problem of language to speak of doing and not doing simultaneously. So it is by faith alone the believer is incorporated into Christ through the Spirit and shares in all his wealth. So Arndt places mystical union at the beginning of the Christian life not the end. It is the beginning.
How much of this beginning is implicit in Abraham C. Bechtel’s subscription of Wahren Christenthum? At the least it tells us that the separation of priesthood and laity was not so great for these Mennonite folk who might be expected to be ordained if their name were chosen out of a hat. In one sense anyone could serve, even as in another anyone could begin this union. We imagine that most of Abraham Bechtel’s family and pretty much everyone he knew might have been more or less so inclined. How else did these Mennonites claim title to ineffable peace?
How is the secret life of a mystic revealed in the ownership of a book? There is a little more evidence with John B. Bechtel, Abraham’s son, who is not only an important name for the provenance of the books, but also for the continuity of the Hereford Mennonites. You may remember he was compared with George Clemens Reiff in the "Mennonite Roster of Families" in a similar preserving function during the Oberholtzer schism in 1848 when he was ordained, that is, the lot fell to him.
His opposite in that division, Christian Clemmer, had been the Hereford pastor, but went to minister with the “New” Mennonites. On a Sunday, January 17, 1852, John B. Bechtel of the Old order, paid to the New order, $75.00 for its one half interest in the old meetinghouse…” (Good, 19) Bechtel wrote that Clemmer “publicly denounces us from the pulpit as trouble makers and good-for-nothings” (John L. Ruth. Maintaining the Right Fellowship. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1984, 283), but Bechtel was conciliatory toward the end of his life. In testimony for a Supreme Court of Pennsylvania Appeal (Samuel H. Landis et al. vs. Henry H. Borneman et al.) (1883), he says that "the object of the conference is to keep the congregations[s] together and to promote unity of opinion, and if any trouble arises to consider and adjust them" (Wenger, 51-52).
When the lot fell to John B. Bechtel at age 41, in 1848, it’s not as though he had been yearning for the call, but his possession and annotation of Die Wandelnde Seele in 1835 suggests he was a kind of Mennonite philosopher. His many signatures in this book and therein his comment that it is “a very useful book” signify his statement of ownership.
To give the title from the first English translation of 1834, The Wandering Soul; or, Dialogues Between the wandering Soul and Adam, Noah, and Simon Cleophas Comprising A History of the World, Sacred and Profane From the Creation Until the Destruction of Jerusalem. Two copies exist in the library, both in German, 1833 and 1834. The 1834 copy has no marks, but that of 1833 is heavily inscribed by both John B. Bechtel and his wife Mary, evidence of their interest.
John B. Bechtel has signed it three times, first with his wife, Mary L., on the front pastedown, in English and then in German. Then, across from these signatures, on the first free endpaper, he has written with a flourish, both in English and in German, “Wandering Soul / a very useful book.” Then, turning the page, he signs his name in German in pencil on the verso while on the recto of the second free endpaper, making utterly certain, he writes large in English, ink with a flourish, “John B. Bechtel / February the 13th 1835.”
What seems eccentricity is more. The Wandering Soul had great popularity among Mennonites of previous eras. Written in Holland in 1635 by Dutch Mennonite Jan Philips Schabaelje, Wandering Soul, translated into German, was published in seven different editions in Pennsylvania from 1767 to 1833. Regardless however of its past it also contributes today to the philosophical debate surrounding dispensationalist theology, that is, the last days that so preoccupy all modern thought much more than was the case in the Left Behind series. The Wandering Soul has been brought back into print by opponents of the dispensational view, the Preterists, who believe the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD fulfilled the major part of the Revelation of St. John, hence they argue that the last days have already occurred. A fictionalized account of world history, The Wandering Soul supports aspects of this, especially concerning Jerusalem. [I did not recognize until editing these Origins 1/31/17, for it was in draft, that this is the Jerusalem of my own composition, Jerusalem Ms. these past two years: Forward Blue Superposition I, and Colonia, but much more in manuscript.
It is harder to categorize the presence in this book collection of Die Ordnung des Heils nach dem Catechifmo Lutheri. (Bernigeroda, 1745) a technical commentary on Luther’s catechism, with a long preface by Samuel Lau and copious notes in ink. The Order of Heaven is externally identified three different ways. First, it is signed on the first free endpaper “Benj. German,” presumably the first owner. Second, there is a book plate on the rear pastedown, “Bibliothek, Pastor E. R. Brobft,” which, third, is signed in pencil “W. W. Deislter(?). As stated, the volume has copious notes in ink throughout as if used for instruction. The notes suggest it belonged to a pastor, as indeed the bookplate states, but another bookplate of Pastor Brobft, on the Lutherifche Kalender of 1875, identifies him as “Paftor G. R. Brobft & Co.” a bookseller in Allentown, Pa. (See, Almanacs in the George A. Smathers Libraries Rare Book Collection). If the extensive notes in ink on most pages mark it as the working text of a pastor, it certainly could have belonged to Elizabeth Bechtel’s brother in law, Peter Mack, Lutheran pastor at Hummelstown before his premature death in 1879, possibly retrieved by Henry Mack. The dates for this are right, or it also could be from the library of John B. Bechtel.
Die Ordnung des Heils is a one of a kind for a Mennonite library. Wahren Christenthem and Die Wandelnde Seele are landmarks of German pietism much appreciated by Mennonites but not in themselves sectarian Mennonite in nature. They represent a mystical-evangelical outlook, the desire for a deeper, more genuine spirituality, a subject much in the air in the 1830s as really almost always among Mennonites who examined every boundary betwee
n their faith and the world.
Most of the books of Elizabeth Bechtel’s time and before are in German, but she was literate also in English. Her signature occurs in German “Elizabeth S. Bechtel” and opposite, in English, “Lizzie S. Bechtel on successive free end papers, in the German and English New Testament. ( New York: American Bible Society, 1870). Obviously her father’s family spoke both languages and of course her husband Henry Mack's entire ledger is in English.
There are two other testaments. Das Neue Testament. Philadelphia: Georg W. Mentz (J. Howe, stereotyper) 1831 [504pp with plates], has a name written twice in German on the front free endpaper and is dated, January 1836. There is a blue paper cutout marker at p. 189. George Mentz, the publisher and bookbinder, was not a printer. He used a variety of Philadelphia-based printers to print his books.
All of this collection may have been kept for a purpose. Two identical copies of Die Kleine Geistliche Harfe der Kinder Zions (Lancaster, 1870), leather bound with clasps, stand side by side. This Zion’s Harfe, (Zion’s Harp) was the Franconia Mennonite Conference hymnal. It had 40 select Psalms in a first section, followed by 474 hymns in a second section under a new title, with some variation in the later editions.These two copies belonged to Henry Mack and Elizabeth Bechtel, evidently from when they were courting. Elizabeth’s is signed “Lizzie L. Bechtel / Feb 11th ’72,” His is stamped with his name “Henry S. Mack.”
Henry was always a singer. His obituary says that he was “active in Mennonite church work for 60 years, serving as chorister and musical director in many churches in this part of the state.” The historian Wenger calls him and his brother, Andrew Mack, choristers since 1860 (120) so obviously he loved music. He led the singing the whole of his life in several different congregations (Wenger, 120). Henry kept their songbooks together all the years after Elizabeth had died.
New testaments and hymn books were standard fare in Mennonite families, as were catechisms. Christliches Gemüths - Gespräch (Christian Spiritual Conversation) by Gerhard Roosen, Ephrata, 1769 was printed for the Mennonites. A popular catechism, the copy here is Lancaster: John Baer’s Sons, 1869. This has been signed on the first free end paper, “Annie B. Mack / Mar 7 1897.”
The English translation, Christian Spiritual Conversation (Lancaster, Pa. John Baer’s Sons, 1892.) is also signed, “Annie B Mack. 1897” on the first front free endpaper, A couple of pages are bookmarked, p. 84, on the baptism of small children and p. 292, “On Predestination.” (Cited in Funk)
First authorized in 1856, the translated Conversation takes a reasoned appeal to nature:
Question: “Are there also men who are not conscious of possessing a higher spirit than brutes, and yet maintain, that they can keep their minds in a good state of rest in this life.”
Answer: “whenever any of these men become of another and a better mind, and get into other reflections, (which cannot take place, however, without divine agency) and continue in them,--they will come not only to a knowledge of the nature of their condition, but also to a knowledge of themselves, and their higher spirit."
Question: “in what then, does man’s true knowledge of himself consist?
Answer: This knowledge consists in two things 1. to know that of and from himself he has no power to do or understand any thing, either in matters external or spiritual. 2. To have a knowledge of his transitory and troublesome state of life” (5-6).
The titles themselves speak. Another popular devotional in the collection is a dual language German-English translation of Habermann’s Prayers of 1873: MORNING AND EVENING / PRAYERS / FOR EVERYDAY OF THE WEEK / BY / /DR JOHN HABERMANN. (Philadelphia, IG. Kohler, 1873). This is initialed in pencil on the second front free endpaper, “AM,” that is, Annie Mack. If we think that the use of a book tells us something of the user then we note that several pages are dog eared. Especially notable this way is p. 103, “prayer of a child” in which we see perhaps the wrestling of the young Annie, beset with difficulty with her stepmother yet trying to subdue herself:
“Give me an obedient heart that I many patiently obey, serve and show myself obliging and ready to do every thing which they desire, that is not contrary to the will of God, nor at variance with my soul’s salvation, so that I may receive their blessing and live a long and pleasant life. Protect me against sin and evil society, so that I may not provoke and grieve my parents with hatred, sadness, unfriendliness, contempt, disobedience and stubbornness, so that I may not bring upon myself here on earth both their and thy curse.”
Through this window we want to ask further of Elisabeth Bechtel, who lived from 1852 to 1885, whether her love was great enough to live even longer, to leave a testament of herself for future centuries, she for whom otherwise all we know is little else than that she had red hair and was one of 8 children?
John and Mary Bechtel buried five of these eight children, all those whose birth and death dates are known, two at Christmas, but they themselves lived into their eighties. That they both signed their names together in the frontis of Die Wandelnde Seele fifty years before speaks of a faith and a greater love. These did not fail them, even should they have so seemed. How could they have believed that even with the loss of their daughter Elizabeth in 1885 they would be honored more than a century later, that their lives would be remembered and in some measure restored? Unbelievable, that their love for each other would be celebrated at some 150th wedding anniversary.
The tragedies in these lives are all too evident, but so are the triumphs, the enthusiasms, the love which we know best in ourselves. When things look bad, when Elisabeth had died, it was the very darkest. We learn from them that that’s when you most need to find the love and faith to believe it will be all right, because it will. The unbelievable promise to a thousand generations is partly fulfilled in the ten from now until someone, some family member, stands in this place and remembers. We learn to be strong in the midst of pain and sorrow. It’s going to be all right. Believe in your children, in yourself, in God.
Postscript
Anna’s family, Bechtels, Longacres, Stauffers, Macks imbibed pretty deeply from the pietist well as pastors and schoolteachers, practical intellectuals, an important glue of the infrastructure. The reading and thinking that concerned Anna Mack was of a different sort, for her mother was not there to buffer the child from the difficulties of younger brothers, step mother, farm bother and little schooling. It was in Anna to want education because it was in her family. She had few books growing up, although Henry’s Ledger mentions a few schoolbooks, but no fairy tales. Aside from the catechisms of 1897 above there is only an Appleton’s Third Reader, dated Oct 28, 1889. Anna’s hunger for the life of the mind was evident not only in her conversation of later years but also in the books she got her daughters. She could not have been more proud when she complained she lost her daughter when she began to read at the age of two, nor done any more to have fostered imaginative delight in her.
Her daughters’ childhood reading included:
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. “Elizabeth Reiff / June 19, 1917. / From Mrs. Lenters.”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. “To Elizabeth / From Mother / Dec. 25, 1917.”
Cinderella; or, The Little Glass Slipper and other Stories. “Dec. 1915. Elizabeth Reiff.”
Raggedy Ann Stories. “Florence M. Reiff.”
A Child’s Garden of Verses. Robert Louis Stevenson. “Florence M. Reiff / 3319 N 15th St.”
Oliver Twist, inscribed “A. Elizabeth Reiff.”
Little Women and Little Men, both inscribed “Elizabeth Reiff.”
Longfellow’s Evangeline.
Aurand’s Collection of Pennsylvania German Stories and Poems.
Yes there is a Pilgrim’s Progress, a Bible given by her grandfather in 1926, but Anna’s attempts to nurture imagination in Elizabeth were thwarted more by her child’s love of the rational than from lack of imaginative reading, what she herself called “realism,” giving no quarter to the fantastic or whimsical. Alice fell on fallow ground where William Osler flourished. In her last years Elizabeth read Malamud’s The Fixer with pleasure, Tolstoy, Dickens, liked translations of the Aeneid. Her theological exposure, reading and understanding was pretty circumscribed however, an aversion probably gained from her mother’s milk. She did not consider Wahren Christenthum and Die Wandelnde Seele in her attic even if she lived them as if they were signed by her as much as here ancestors who engaged in their own lively thoughts.
Works Cited
Joel Alderfer, "Several Documents Relating to Early Franconia Conference Mennonites." In Mennonite Historians of Eastern Pennsylvania, Newsletter Supplement, July, 1984.
Richard Warren Davis. Emigrants, Refugees and Prisoners. Vol. II. 1997.
Douglas L. Good. The Growth of a Congregation: A History of the Hereford Mennonite Church New Order. Bally, PA. 1988.Christian Funk.
Mirror for all Mankind. Norristown, PA,1814.John F. Funk.
The Mennonite Church and Her Accusers. Elkhart, Indiana: Mennonite Publishing Company, 1878.
The Perkiomen Region [PR] Originally published by the Historical and Natural Science Society of the Perkiomen Region, Pennsburg, PA, 1921, republished by Adams Apple Press, 1994.
Fred J. Riffe. Reiff to Riffe Family in America, 1995.
John L. Ruth. ‘Twas Seeding Time: A Mennonite View of the American Revolution. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1976.
Ralph Beaver Strassburger. The Strassburger Family and Allied Families of Pennsylvania. Gwynedd Valley, PA, 1922.
J. C. Wenger. History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference. Telford, PA. Franconia Mennonite Historical Society, 1937. Mennonite Publishing House, Scottdale, PA, 1985.
Further Acknowledgments
From driving to Skippack in 1974, finding old copies of the Goshenhoppen Region at the first stop, to the next day contacting the editor and going on a dig with him and his students at the Jacob Reiff farm, it is also remarkable that my brothers and I lived through aspects of Mennonite passages of life, 1) non-resistance 2) service among alien or deprived peoples 3) agricultural experience, 4) separation from the world. Unconscious origins without knowing. Acknowledgments are also due to my brother Robert A. Reiff who accompanied me in these searches of war records, ship lists and newspaper accounts in the beginning of this effort in 1974.
Pennsylvania German folk and art conflicted with English prejudice in the lives of these families. Doing no more than being born revealed such attitudes, but it took some time to understand since it was understated. Nobody referred to folk motifs any more than they blamed the English, but there was blame, English values emulated but not believed attainable, any more than folk art could be fine. To a writer like myself the result of this encounter with flowers, books, paintings, pottery, letters, manuscripts and furniture is rich, though unrealized until the principals had gone, as secretive now about the past as they were while storing up these treasures.
Considering that verse in the Bible about being compassed with a cloud of witnesses, these unseen artifacts were hidden or unknown in their significance until it was clear that their places, if unoccupied, would cease to exist. Little wonder then that quest in old histories to find lives of fathers and mothers.
