History of the GRanDMA Genealogical Database

Some History of the GRANDMA Database

        --Alan Peters, August, 2020, excerpted by Ken Ratzlaff, April, 2021.

The GRANDMA (“Genealogical Record and Database of Mennonite Ancestry”) database was established in the early 1990’s to serve as a centralized and organized collection of Mennonite genealogical information and data. The purpose was to enable those conducting family research regarding certain Mennonite/Anabaptist surnames to join efforts and establish a computerized database containing a regularly updated compilation of the research findings of all contributors into a single relational database of Mennonite ancestry. The goal was to enable those accessing the database to discover what genealogical information—generally birth, baptism, marriage, death and burial records—had already been recorded and entered for any particular person of interest, and what the sources for those data items were.

Historical Background

I began collecting family information and data in 1950 as part of a fifth-grade class assignment at my public elementary school in San Jose, California. My initial efforts were focused on my own family background, which was composed totally of persons with direct roots in the Mennonite communities in what was then referred to as “South Russia” by most Mennonite historians, and in the Mennonite congregations of Deutsch Wymyschle and Deutsch Kazun just north of Warsaw, Poland. In addition, all my recent ancestors—and my own family—had been associated with the Mennonite denomination known as the Mennonite Brethren, one of the dozens of different Mennonite groups in North America and throughout the world.

My research began by discussing family history with my four grandparents, which provided me both with accurate information and many stories and raised many questions regarding the historical accuracy of their accounts. My goal was to record the data that I could learn from them and other relatives, secure additional documentary evidence, and then organize it into both family listings and also family lines for all of my known—and then unknown—ancestors.

My parents and grandparents were able to provide clear information regarding themselves and their immediate families, and they also talked about sketchy and intriguing family histories in other lands, particularly Russia and Poland, both of which were at that time under soviet political domination, which limited accessibility for further research and information.

However, I used whatever available sources were available and searched through them for the additional information they could provide. This included such materials as family bibles, other family registers, interviews with numerous relatives, governmental records and certificates, and the obituaries that I could locate in such periodicals as the Christian Leader, Zionsbote, Mennonitische Rundschau, and Die Post. I also wrote the Russian embassy, inquiring how I might secure such records from them, and was confronted with a twelve page application form, asking not only for the exact location of any records that I might want, but also the names and addresses of all known relatives in Russia, along with a $9.00 charge for each record that I wanted. I quickly realized that the existing Russian sources would not be available for my review at that time.

To accommodate the increasing amount of data that resulted, I created a 3x5 inch card file of the persons for whom I was able to collect data. I soon discovered that I often had to backtrack and reread many sources that I had already reviewed whenever I discovered previously unknown relatives—persons that I had not initially realized were related to me, and therefore ignored their data. I then made the decision that, since I didn’t know who else in the source I was reviewing would turn out to be a relative, it only made sense to collect information on every Mennonite individual in that source, assuming that they all would end up being related.

One of the hand-written family registers that my grandmother provided me was an old notebook in which a great-great grandfather born in Danzig, Poland wrote of his birth and listed his various family members. This led me to the Mennonitische Forschungsstelle, which had just moved from Goettingen, Germany to the Weierhof. My correspondence with that organization resulted in the securing of a microfilm copy of all the surviving Mennonite church records from the Flemish Mennonite Congregation in Danzig. This provided years of additional typing of 3x5 cards—one for each person mentioned in that microfilm.

My college studies placed me at Tabor College in Hillsboro, Kansas, and there I discovered the riches of the Mennonite Historical Library and Archives at Bethel College, at nearby Newton, Kansas. Here, with the help of Cornelius Krahn, I was able to see in person the original Danzig record books that I had reviewed by microfilm, and was also able to smell them, experiencing the aftereffects of the fire they were thrown into by the Russian soldiers who confronted Gustav Reimer as he escaped with them to the west at the end of the war! Fortunately, when they saw the books were burning, they left and he was able to rescue them from the fire, leaving smoky burned edges around many of the pages, but happily most of the information was rescued intact!

At Tabor College, I met my future wife Jeanie, and discovered that she was from a totally different Mennonite group known as the Krimmer Mennonite Brethren (KMB). That introduced me to a whole new and related Anabaptist ancestral group, known as the Hutterites, many of whom joined the KMB when they migrated to North America and chose not to return to their earlier commitment to communal “colony” life, preferring to own and live on their own property as they had in South Russia when they came under Johann Cornies’ protection. This added thousands more 3x5 cards to my collection.

Over the years, my continuously growing collection of these records came to the attention of many others, who sought information from me about their own families. Because I had made the early decision to completely canvass every source I came across, regardless of whether I had any relatives in it, I was able to help many people in their search for their own roots. Because of my almost “obsessive-compulsive” approach to data collection, I ended up with two large industrial card files containing more than 200,000 individual cards, each representing a Mennonite individual. Along with several others, I contributed to an issue of the periodical Mennonite Family History, in which I joined all of the other Mennonite genealogists submitting articles in declaring that the personal computer would NOT be a helpful tool in organizing our own collections of Mennonite family records. At that time, our collections were far too comprehensive and large, far beyond the capability of those early PC’s. My own first IBM PC had internal storage of only 64K and relied on now long outdated 5 ¼ inch floppy discs, each of which could hold only 256K of data.

However, by the 1990’s, the ever-growing capabilities of the personal computer had grown much faster than our collections did, and we soon realized that the computer had become the real solution for collecting and compiling family data, far surpassing my unwieldy card file index. A number of friends approached me and inquired whether I would agree to computerize my collection of Mennonite family information and make it accessible to all, allowing anyone to benefit from my decades of research, and also enable others to contribute their own research findings to expand the database, using my data as the beginning nucleus for the system.

I quickly agreed, suggesting that we call our new effort “GRANDMA”, short for the “Genealogical Record and Database of Mennonite Ancestry”) and personally entered the data for the first volume in the GRANDMA CD series, making myself and my wife persons #1 and #2 in the serial listing of individuals in the database, which now is nearing 1,445,000 individuals. We established the “Genealogical Project Committee” under the umbrella of the California Mennonite Historical Society, to supervise the growth and development of the project. I was privileged to chair this committee for many years, with other members of the founding committee being (in alphabetical order): Kevin Enns-Rempel, Jane Friesen, Robert and Carol Friesen, Jay Hubert, Jeffrey Wall, and myself. Jeff provided the energy and the legal advice we needed, Jay and Bob provided their technological brilliance, Kevin provided the business expertise, Jane and Carol met the data-entry challenge (and much else!), and I provided the database and the many years of data collection “trials and errors”, along with much data entry. Together, we made the important initial decisions, and oversaw the many subsequent additions and improvements. In recent years, we have added others to the committee, with Tim Janzen becoming our mentor, fellow master genealogist, and DNA expert. In recent years, Ken Ratzlaff has significantly broadened our technological scope and outreach capabilities by masterfully creating and overseeing “GRANDMA’s Window”—the online version of the GRANDMA database. I would like to add that all of those listed above have been total volunteers in the development and implementation of GRANDMA. None of us have received any compensation at any time during these years, instead choosing to place all the proceeds from the program in a Research and Development Fund, that gave us the financial ability to secure archival materials, underwrite genealogical research and translation services, provide support for the microfilming and digitization of records, purchase family genealogies and other publications, secure all the necessary equipment and supplies for the program, and develop the capability to finance additional software if needed.

Initial decisions led us to John Steed and his “Brothers Keeper” software package. It was not only the most comprehensive program available at the time, but it also had the capability of handling a database of 1,000,000 persons (which he later increased to 10,000,000 at our request), but also provided a special indexing capability that allows the user to search the database using special tools that we could create ourselves. He has been a continuing and helpful partner in building the software we needed, even when it required him to change the program to suit our needs.

The special computer indexing tools that we developed we called “Surname Codes” and “Personal Name Codes”. We had long recognized that the spelling of both first names and surnames had created duplicate versions of the same names, and that centuries of record Keepers, language differences, and family preferences had created a multitude of spelling differences that left researchers subject to inadvertent duplication of an individual’s record in the database. Many of the surnames have a variety of different spellings even though the individuals with that surname are related, and many first names can be, and have been, recorded differently in different records. For example, there are dozens of different spellings of the rare Mennonite surname “Teichroeb”, but they all represent the same surname, and we know that the first name “John” can be recorded as Johan, Johann, Ivan, John, Jan, Johannes, and even sometimes Jack! Our invention of the name codes enabled us to be confident that our computer search enabled us to locate ALL the different spellings of names, enormously reducing the number of duplicate entries into the database. This is where we are today in continuing to manage this already historic effort to make Mennonite genealogical information accessible to researchers and the general public. We see GRANDMA as a valuable prototype for further technological efforts to computerize all genealogical collections, potentially linking us all together globally in currently unimaginable ways in the future.

The Current Question We Face

The success of GRANDMA has led us into new territories that we couldn’t anticipate in the 1990’s. Our scope then was intentionally quite narrow: to provide a research database for Mennonites and Hutterites who were descended from the Dutch-Low German-Prussian-Russian (“DLPR”) segment of Mennonite roots. In those days, “Mennonite” ancestry was something that we thought we clearly understood and comprehended. The term “Mennonite” was descriptive of both ethnicity and religion. Being “Mennonite” throughout history was both an ethnic reality in addition to being a religious one. This was reinforced over the centuries by the two-fold effects whereby persons “outside” the Mennonite fold customarily avoided marrying into or otherwise joining the Mennonite community and, likewise, persons “inside” the Mennonite community were not encouraged—and usually were not inclined—to marry persons outside the community. This created a quasi-ethnicity that developed over centuries—much like the Jewish community—where an ethnic identity resulted separate from nationality due to religious “apartheid”. Historically, even a person from one “brand” of the Mennonite universe seldom married a person from one of the other “non-DLPR” Mennonite communities.

This is no longer the case. Many persons now consider themselves ethnically Mennonite because of their ancestry, but no longer participate in a Mennonite religious setting. Correspondingly, many persons of other ethnicities now consider themselves religious Mennonites but have no ancestral “Mennonite” roots. They have simply joined a Mennonite congregation.

The original intent of the GRANDMA program was to provide a database focused on persons of “Dutch, Low German, Prussian” Mennonite ancestry. The list of surnames that populate the database were well known to us. We could recognize a person as “part of the program” by simply hearing their surname. We knew what names were automatically eligible for inclusion. In addition, there has been an increasing number of persons of “DLPR” Mennonite ethnicity who have married persons belonging to one of the other Mennonite ethnic traditions, causing a significantly growing number of persons with a variety of Mennonite ancestors, some belonging to the “Dutch, Low German, Prussian” ancestral chain, but also descended from other Mennonite strands, such as the “Swiss Mennonite”, “Pennsylvania Dutch”, or “Amish” ancestral chains.