GENEALOGY AS WINDOW INTO WHO WE WERE AND ARE

Kara Hartzler

Betty Hartzler began tracing her family’s genealogy nearly thirty years ago and has since produced several books, two cemetery listings, and a database of over 48,000 names. She and her daughter Kara Hartzler (author of last issue’s “Artist Myths and Beyond”) recently sat down on the back deck to talk about genealogy, faith, and historical trends in the Mennonite church.

What initially sparked your interest in genealogy?

When we went from Kansas to Belleville for that year—what would it have been, 1974?—we bought the Hertzler/Hartzler book and I started reading through it. On page twenty-something I found the names of our Kansas neighbors and that started the wheels spinning. Why are these people—Kansas farmers who are not Mennonite—in the same book that my husband’s Mennonite-Amish family is in?

So I started tracing them back and found it’s because they came with the Whitestone church group and then it piqued my interest even more: Why are some people no longer in the church? How did the church function, and what keeps it hanging together?

I started tracing Ken’s family with index cards. I put down his grandfather and all his children, then the great-grandfather and all his children—each family on one index card. I started with the Hertzler/Hartzler book, then branched out to other genealogy books. At first I only picked out our family relations; later I widened it to groups of people with a common history.

What did you do next?

I started talking to Grandpa Kauffman and had him write down his memories of growing up. Then I talked to my aunts and uncles on Dad’s side and asked each to write stories of when they were growing up. Some of the uncles just said, “Come over and I’ll talk to you, and you can write it down.”

So I started this notebook that had oral histories in it. Now I have maybe thirty different notebooks of different family lines with stories, pictures—anything I come across, I put in that family’s notebook.

What does most of your day-to-day genealogical work consist of?

What I originally did with the Swiss-Russian Mennonites was to take all the pertinent genealogy books from the Bethel College historical library—maybe thirty or forty—and enter the families into the database up to a certain generation, maybe third or fourth. So I did all that, and now I’m starting to go back in the same genealogy books and become more inclusive of different surnames through more generations. New books are being written all the time, so I add the information in those as well as what people send me through the Internet.

I’m also on the third update of my father’s family—the Peter O. Graber book—and that comes out about every five years. And I’ve done a booklet on the Locust Grove (Belleville, Pa.) cemetery as well as the Eastlawn (Hesston, Kan.) cemetery.

What would be the historical purpose of these cemetery books? Who would use them?

For Locust Grove, when I tried to find gravestones of Ken’s relatives, I learned there were no written burial records. So I began with a 1950s county listing, added what information I could from the gravestones, then filled in details from genealogy books.

So now there’s a written record of the gravesites, which means somebody can go to the cemetery knowing an ancestor’s name and walk directly to that site. One of my goals has been to turn genealogy from a stuffy old kind of thing that people aren’t interested in to a user-friendly system that answers the questions people have.

When you enter all this information in the database, are there trends you can see in the Mennonite church?

Yes, and you can see it in terms of familes. An example is when the Daniel Kauffman-inspired Fundamentalism movement of the 1920s began emphasizing cape dresses and straight-cut coats. The first generation really stuck to it. The next generation followed it outwardly but may have done so because of church requirements. By the third generation, the children were leaving the church because they only saw the outward shell of rules and regulations. You can just see it happen in family after family.

It’s exactly the same in institutions. The question of whether a church will grow or slide into decline depends on how well each generation can help the following generation establish their own beliefs—even if those beliefs manifest themselves differently. If it becomes a secondhand belief, it usually gets lost.

Based on your genealogical research and historical patterns you’ve seen in your data, could you make a prediction about where the church is going?

This is just my own perception, but as the line between church and society fades, the church often loses its core beliefs. Yet I do think God always preserves a remnant. It seems churches that can draw a sharp line between themselves and society at large without heavy-handed rules do a better job of retaining their young people.

When you say remnant, what do you mean?

The Amish are a good example. They’ve had all these splits, and at one point, many Amish became Amish-Mennonite or Mennonite. These splits are often over very petty things, like the Amishman who bought a house and refused to cut off the eaves, then a fellow church member supported him by building a doghouse with eaves on it and the church split because of it.

The General Conference break with the “Old” Mennonite Church was among other things about whether to keep written notes at conference. And now although those two main church groups are reuniting in a merged denomination, some congregations are splitting off over the homesexuality issue. I don’t think that’s the key issue, people are just hanging a lot onto it. More than likely, the key issue is going back to how the church is structured and where the church authority comes from.

I’ve heard you talk about the fact that your interest in genealogy is very rooted in your faith. Where do you think the intersection is between those two?

For me, genealogy is a way of understanding God by viewing the way he interacts with people. I think it’s been a very healthy thing, giving me roots, not only just in terms of family systems, but in terms of trying to figure out how people operate, how churches grow and decline, and basically how God leads through a group of people.

I think we need to understand who we are in light of our past. For example, God says your sins will follow you to the seventh generation—why or how does that happen?

And I don’t think this works just in the case of sins. For instance, in our family you can ask, Why does the Graber family have such a love of cheese? Well, you go back to Switzerland and because of persecution, they moved further and further up in the mountains. This meant they couldn’t sell their milk daily in town, so they made cheese and transported it that way. I mean, how many generations down are we now, ten generations, and we still love cheese!

So it helps me understand why God says in the Bible that something will follow you generation after generation. And it’s important for people to realize they are who they are because of their background, even if they’re not aware of it or want to change it. Whether it’s good or bad, it’s part of who you are.

(You can access Betty’s genealogy database at http://www.freepages.genealogy. rootsweb.com/
~bettysgenealogies/index.html).

—Kara Hartzler lives in Iowa City, Iowa, and is completing her Masters of Fine Arts in Playwriting.