How this Project Started

As I’ve written elsewhere on this site, I’ve always been interested in my genealogy and my Mennonite heritage. I wrote an essay about it at university, and I and my brother Rod compiled an extensive genealogical database, large portions of which I contributed to Ezra Eby Revived!, the most comprehensive database on Mennonites and Amish and Brethren in Christ families in Waterloo Region.

But this particular project got sparked when my daughter Vanessa asked when and where our ancestors settled on this land. She was preparing for a talk she was going to be giving at the University of Waterloo, and she wanted to do a traditional acknowledgement of the First Nations whose lands she was standing on. She had learned in her work with First Nations people in British Columbia that the convention is to introduce yourself by saying where you come from, who your own people are, before thanking the people upon whose land you are meeting.

I told her that our people (on my side of the family anyway) were from Pennsylvania, that we had come to this land around 1820, that our people had purchased the land from a guy who bought it from the Haudenosaunee peoples, that there was some confusion about an unpaid mortgage. But her question got me wondering about when exactly our ancestors had arrived and where exactly they’d settled.

I realized then that I had only ever researched the Martin portion of my genealogy. This was fairly reasonable since 3 of my 4 grandparents were descendants of the 2 Martin cousins who came to this place, and it was a pretty complicated family tree looking just at the Martin line(s). But it occured to me that all of those Martins had married other people (only in a few cases other Martins), and I knew nothing about those other lineages.

So I got into the online genealogies and traced all of my ancestors back to the people who first immigrated into Waterloo Region and sometimes beyond into Pennsylvania. In the process of doing this, I discovered that the Waterloo Region Generations database includes all of the information that Ezra Eby provided about each family in his monumental A Biographical History of Waterloo Township, published in 1895 and 1896. This included information about which lots in Blocks 2 and 3 each family had settled on. And the From Pennsylvania to Waterloo website included Eby’s original introduction, which described who arrived each year from 1800 on, as well as general information about the settlement.

I started writing a document about all of my immigrant ancestors, when they arrived, where exactly they settled (in relation to present-day roads and settlements), and any other information I could find. Initially, I created a road trip itinerary that visited the farms of each of our immigrant ancestors, including any children who immigrated with them and settled when they were married. But then, I got interested in the other history surrounding the bare facts of immigration.

Vanessa was doing a bit of research of her own and happened to come across an essay, “From the Banks of the Grand,” written by a Geoff Martin about the Haudenosaunee who owned this land before us and the controversy surrounding how our people acquired the land. It was in reading this essay that I learned that the Six Nations people had not received any of the money that our people had brought back from Pennsylvania to pay off Richard Beasley’s mortgage.

I was stunned. The essay is beautifully written and it was a revelation to me: I really do live on stolen First Nations land. I looked into Geoff and found he had also written an essay called “Baked Clay” about the black settlements in the Queen’s Bush that pre-existed our ancestors’ settlement. Again, I was blown away. I found Geoff’s email address, and we started corresponding and discovered that his mother is my third cousin and he and I share a lot of interests.

Besides learning more about this land that we settled on and who had been here before us (refugees all), I got interested once again in how it came about that there are about 10 distinct Mennonite groups in the county. I reread Donald Martin’s book on the Old Order Mennonites (Gelassenheit), which led me further and further into the rabbit hole of Mennonite evolution right back to the beginnings, but focussing especially on what has been going on here over the last 200 years. My relatives are spread across at least seven of these groups, and I wanted to know how that happened.

It was about this point that my partner Sande and sister Sherri encouraged me to write something more about where we come from, specifically so our children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews, who have never had much contact with Mennonites, can have a better understanding of our history.

While researching the early Mennonite church, following up on some of the ancestors who I discovered were ordained Mennonite ministers, I came across another relative of mine, Andrew Martin. Andy is a theologian who studies Old Order spirituality, something that some of my born-again relatives might say doesn’t exist. Again, I got in contact with Andy, and we started a conversation about our researches and about all of the many intersections between our lives.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, I had a ready-made project to keep me occupied in isolation. So I just kept going. And I’m not done yet, as of this writing.

I hope you enjoy all of this even a fraction as much as I do.