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Mennonite Genealogy, Inc. FAQs for the GRanDMA Genealogical Database→ Draft! ← |
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Click on any question to view or hide the answer. This is a complicated question. We’ll try to make some sense of it here. First and foremost, “Mennonite” is a religious term that has nothing to do with race, culture, or ethnicity. Mennonites are a Christian denomination whose historic roots trace back to the Anabaptists of the sixteenth century. Anyone, regardless of nationality, race, or ethnic identity, who identifies with that religious heritage is a Mennonite. At the same time, Mennonites are sometimes described as an “ethno-religious” group. Many people (whether they now identify religiously as Mennonites or not), can trace back much of their ancestry to Mennonites who once lived in Russia and Poland. It is not uncommon, in fact, for some people to have only Mennonite ancestors going back over several centuries. For such people, being “Mennonite” often includes a strong sense of ethnic and cultural identity along with a religious identity. But how did this happen? The sixteenth-century Anabaptists didn’t set out to create a distinct “ethnic” identity, and probably would be horrified that it happened. Nonetheless, a combination of historical circumstances and theology helped create a sense of ethnic identity among many Mennonites. In the face of intense persecution in the earliest years of the movement, many Anabaptists and later Mennonites fled their homelands in places such as Switzerland and the Netherlands to find greater tolerance elsewhere. They took with them not only their faith, but also their native languages and other cultural qualities to new countries such as Poland, Russia, Paraguay, Canada, and the United States. Their beliefs about being separate from “the world” also encouraged Mennonites to hold the cultures of these new homelands at arm’s length. Marriage outside the Mennonite church was forbidden if an individual expected to remain a church member in good standing. Given the small size of the various Mennonite communities, this inevitably resulted in frequent inter-marriage. Within this context faith and ethnic identity – for better or for worse – became almost synonymous. In North America, this linkage between faith and ethnicity didn’t begin to diminish significantly until the mid-twentieth century. The adoption of English and a growing desire to do evangelistic work slowly led to a more diverse Mennonite Church. Restrictions on marriage outside the narrowly-defined Mennonite community also became less common. Meanwhile, Mennonite mission work around the world led to the creation of new Mennonite communities without any ancestral connections to places like Poland or Russia. Many of these Mennonite churches in places such as Asia and Africa today are the fastest-growing Mennonite groups in the world, and have helped to redefine what it means to be a “Mennonite.” The genealogical data project, originally undertaken by the California Mennonite Historical Society, focuses on the descendants of those Mennonites who once lived in Poland or Russia. We don’t worry about what religious identity (if any) those people have today. We also don’t care what other cultural, racial, or ethnic identities those people might claim. We’re trying to document the way descendants of a particular group of people have changed over time, and not to suggest any kind of value judgment between people who have lots of Mennonite ancestors and people who don’t have any. We also have no interest in defining any kind of “pure” Mennonite identity based on ancestry, since such a thing simply doesn’t exist. The people included in our database aren’t more “Mennonite” simply because of their ancestry than are those Mennonites without such ancestry and therefore not in the database. Many people are confused by the relationship between Brother’s Keeper®, GMOL and the GRanDMA Project, sometimes assuming that they are two names for the same thing. This is not the case. GMOL is a method of viewing the GRanDMA database. GMOL performs searches and prepares reports, all on line and was written specially for GRanDMA by Ken Ratzlaff. Brother’s Keeper is a commercial genealogy program designed by John Steed. It existed before the GRanDMA Project was founded, and is used by many persons outside the GRanDMA Project. Early in the development of GRanDMA, we chose Brother’s Keeper® as the best general-purpose program for our purposes. Look here for an explanation of why we prefer Brother’s Keeper. GRanDMA itself is not a program, but only the genealogical data files that we created. You must use GMOL, Brother’s Keeper® (or another compatible genealogy program) to read these data files. You need to use the Gedcom file if you are working with a genealogy program other than Brother’s Keeper®. The master GRanDMA database is updated almost daily with contributions by users, but currently it is released to users near the beginning of most months. For release to the public, the GRanDMA database must be converted into three forms: an online database for GRanDMA OnLine, a Gedcom file, and a Brother’s Keeper®7 database. The copyright statement on the GRanDMA database applies only to the GRanDMA database as a whole. We don’t want people reproducing the entire genealogy database and distributing it to others. The copyright does not, however, apply to the individual pieces of genealogical information themselves. That information was gathered from a wide variety of public domain sources, and we hold no copyright on them. You are free to take information on specific family lines and incorporate it into your own work. Yes, GRanDMA uses a "name code" system that links variant spellings of surnames and given names. GRanDMA OnLine will automatically convert names to those codes when searching, and it is possible for BK to search with that code system. Brother’s Keeper®users will need to be a bit mnore deliberate. First, search for a name using the spelling that you think is correct. If you don't find the person, look at one of the items in the results list and find the "Ref.number" field. It typically will be a three-digit/two-letter code. The code for Maria Enns, for example, is "060ma." The three digits refer to the surname; the two letters refer to the given name. Go back to the search box and type the / character followed by the name code. The new results list will show all spelling variations. Country names can be complicated since some change with time or with changing borders. Our goal is to assign the name of the country at the time of birth, but this has not always been followed. So corrections are made from time to time. There are some exceptions. For example, the region of "South Russia" was not the name of a country, but is usually used for the area before it became Ukraine. Volhynia, Galicia, Crimea, and Asiatic Russia also referred to as regions instead of countries. We are very interested in receiving any changes you have made to the GRanDMA database or any new files that you might have created on your own. Choose the most suitable option from those listed below if you want to send us your information:
The GRanDMA database has been created through the combined efforts of many genealogists. We freely accept contributions of data from anyone willing to help. We cannot independently verify every piece of information contributed to us in this way. In cases where a contribution contained many obvious problems of form or content, we would choose not to add it to the database. Beyond such obvious cases, however, we can't guarantee that every item sent to us is factual. GRanDMA users should be aware that the database does contain errors. It is no substitute for original source material. We ask contributors to include documentation in the Source field in order to verify the accuracy of their information. We do not require source documentation, however, and many entries have no documentation. In such cases, GRanDMA users should take the information for what it is--the potentially unverified and undocumented statement of another genealogist. We consider GRanDMA to be a "work in progress." We think it best to put the information in front of the largest possible audience, knowing that it contains some errors, and hoping that the rest of you will let us know where corrections are needed. Through this ongoing process, we are confident that GRanDMA will become an increasingly accurate and complete database of Low German Mennonite ancestry. See "Some History of the GRANDMA Database" excerpted from a document by Alan Peters. | |||||
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