Tuesday, August 2, 2022

Three Mack Brothers

  Three Mack Brothers 

  Henry Mack and his wife Elizabeth's Mennonite songbooks lay signed side by side in that attic with also a copy of Henry's inventory of graves of the Old Hereford Mennonite Cemetery, Record of Tombstone Inscriptions / Old Mennonite Cemetery of the Hereford Congregation of Mennonites (1934). In her 90s this water colorist aunt also gave me two books of ledgers of her grandfather Henry S. Mack,1870-1900 that he had kept from the age of 21.  Following that, excerpts of a journal of Henry's brother, Peter S. Mack (1842-1879) were discovered from a Hummelstown library. He had been pastor of the Zion Lutheran Church of Hummelstown, PA.  Further, translations of 49 the letters of Bishop Andrew S. Mack in the Jacob B. Mensch Collection were elicited from the Old Mennonite translator Issac Horst. Hence, writing by all three brothers emerged, who were also lifelong musicians. The postcards from France during WWI of  Anna's brother, Harvey Mack also surfaced. He drove an ambulance like E. E. Cummings, and stayed after the war to work as a carpenter in the French reconstruction, and thereafter remained a carpenter the rest of his life. Uncle Harvey, born the same day as this writer and the mother of his grandchildren, was a large encouragement to my father before and after his father's premature death in 1927. Harvey had also a ministry of reconciliation in France because he was a German speaker. He was given German POWs to shepherd and repatriate whom he revisited later in life. See A Service of Love in Wartime: American Friends Relief Work in Europe, 1917-1919 (Appendix, 275).

 Without knowing then, my generation was the tenth generation of those paternal ancestors who emigrated to Philadelphia in the first decades of the eighteenth century or before, part of a homogeneous population of Swiss-German immigrants from the Palatinate, initially Reformed, then predominantly Mennonite, who intermarried among people like themselves for nine succeeding generations.  Jacob Howard Reiff, was the first to marry out of this community. His children, the tenth generation who lived in America, began with merely formal lives as Mennonites or none at all. I was the last, consecrated at six months, 29 Mar 1942, by John J. Henert, Pastor of the First Mennonite Church at Reese and Diamond Streets in Philadelphia where our great grandfather Henry Mack used to lead the singing.

This was the only Mennonite church inside the city at the beginning of the 20th century. The ninth and eighth generations of Macks and Reiffs, my father and grand fathers had been members there. Those who worshiped at “New” First Mennonite Church of Philadelphia however were themselves a step removed from their rural “Old” Mennonite families who still lived in Skippack and Worcester. The tenth generation was a further step removed when its parents became Presbyterian shortly following the consecrations of their first two sons, and joined the mother's Tioga Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia.

My grandmother, Anna Bechtel Mack Reiff (1880-1970) had taken refuge at five with her Mennonite uncle, bishop Andrew Mack (1836-1917) after her mother, Elisabeth Bechtel died after the birth of her third child. Also a farmer, cabinet maker, farmer, stone puller, forty nine letters, 1870-1906, of Andrew Mack remain. This Anna and her daughter Elizabeth became the important curators who transmitted these events to the future, but after her father Henry remarried Anna got only a sixth grade education and worked the farm. Desperate for escape, with an innate sense of idealism and duty, Anna Bechtel Mack, with claims to be A Mennonite Tailor, outdid every expectation in serendipity.

 Anna was a daughter of families deep in Mennonite pastors and bishops, Bechtels and Macks.  At the time of her choice for the new in 1906, her father, Henry Mack, had also moved to the city and begun a butter and egg business. Both Reiff and Mack families, who had known each other in the country, worshipped together in the city. As “Old” Mennonite changed to “New,” apologists for the public school system, choosing ministers by lot, plain dress of the clergy, their advancing age, the growing use of English, mechanical innovation and the wind of change led to the divergence (Good, 13-14).

Connected as the result of selection in this Perkiomen region, the roster of families included Reiff, Mack, Moyer, Bechtel, Longacre, Stauffer, Rosenberger, Gehman, Clemmer, Lapp, Landis, Schwenk, Bauer, Markley, Dotterer, Clemens, Hendricks, Turner, Hunsicker, Landis. 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 [borrowed from here].

The 1024 examples of ten generations whose roots entwine these families remain in records as land owners, trustees, executors, deacons, ministers within thirty miles of where we were born in Germantown. The English won the cultural conflict in the war of language, but the unwritten flowers, books, paintings, pottery, letters, manuscripts and furniture of that family made them rich remained.