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).
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.
