It’s a Small World, the Mennosphere

As I’ve implied all along in this blog, the Mennonite world has been shrinking rapidly for me as I’ve delved ever deeper into my Mennonite roots. This culminated in my recognition that I am related to everyone of Swiss (as opposed to Russian) Mennonite heritage, not only here in Waterloo County, but everywhere in North America. We are all descended from a few handsful of deeply inter-married Mennonite families who immigrated to Pennsylvania from Europe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

This fact struck me anew, however, just recently.

My partner in life, Sande (who is of German Lutheran heritage), has been volunteering for several years with an organization called Third Age Learning – Kitchener-Waterloo (TAL-KW). In an effort to promote life-long learning (and to keep senior citizens off the streets and out of the casinos), this non-profit group arranges lecture series that run for six to eight weeks, two or three times a year. Sande sits on their program committee, which comes up with topics and finds the speakers, as well as on their board of directors.

As might be expected, a lot of the volunteers are retirees from the educational community (I almost wrote “industry”): teachers, professors, administrators, and the like. And, not surprising in a place like Kitchener-Waterloo, a significant number of them are Mennonites of one sort or another.

So, anyway, a few weeks before Christmas, Sande got together for a Christmas social with her colleagues on the program committee. Somehow, during the festivities, they got talking about Rockway Mennonite Collegiate, a school where at least one of them had taught and of which everyone was aware. A fellow program committee member, who is a friend of ours and a public school board trustee, suggested that Rockway can provide such a superb educational experience because it is an elite private school, a place of privilege.

Sande countered that she knows someone who went to Rockway because he was bored and getting into trouble in the public system, and his by-no-means-wealthy parents decided he might do better in a smaller “Christian” environment. Right away, another committee member, Betti, asked who Sande was talking about, suggesting that she might know the person in question.

Sande said, “Well, it’s my partner Rick’s uncle, Don.” And Betti responded, “Oh, I know Don. He was married to my cousin Janet! Oh, yeah, I remember Donnie and his motorcycle!” Sande was, to say the least, gob-smacked. Betti was a fairly recent addition to TAL-KW, who Sande didn’t yet know well. And she herself had never met Janet—had really only ever heard her mentioned in passing—since Don and Janet had been divorced for years and Don was re-married with several children by the time she and I got together. (Don and Janet met at Rockway Collegiate, by the way.)

Of course, when Sande came home and told me this story, I got right onto ezraeby.com and searched for Betti. I found her quickly, then checked how we’re related, other than she being my one-time aunt by marriage (she is my mother’s fifth cousin through Weber ancestors and my maternal grandmother’s fifth cousin through Martin ancestors). I then sent an email to uncle Don to tell him the story. He didn’t right away remember Betti (like me, she’s seven years younger than he is) or the Burkholder cousins, but he was deeply interested since he’d lost track of Janet some years ago.

By acting as a virtual conduit between Don and Betti, Sande and I were able to provide Don with contact information for Janet’s younger sister. Over the Christmas holidays, Don talked to Janet’s sister, who brought him up to date with Janet’s life and provided him with Janet’s daughter’s contact information. Don then spoke with the daughter and, finally, had a long telephone reunion with Janet. It sounds like they were both very happy to find each other again.

I suppose some people might find the Mennosphere a bit claustrophobic and oppressive. But I’ve got to say that being a part of stories like this one makes me pretty happy, makes me feel a real part of the community. I’m looking forward to meeting my newfound cousin Betti.