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The Cycle of Time and Maternal and Childhood Mortality

Rudnerweide (Molotschna) Elder Franz Görz’s wife Maria gave birth to fifteen children in Prussia over twenty-two years, including two sets of twins. Only six children survived infancy, and two of these six died on the journey to Russia (note 1). Maria Görz’s personal history of grief and loss is connected to the cycle of pregnancy, birth, nursing, childcare and death that continued throughout a Mennonite woman’s entire childbearing years—with an average of nine live births, and the premature death of four to five children each (note 2).

Each family arrived to New Russia with its own personal history of loss. Diaries point to the vulnerability and danger of death for women in childbirth, but also to a strong network of community care amongst the women (note 3).

Since their childhood, the Confession of Faith and catechism defined the place and roles they would occupy as women in a pre-modern, unchanging time before “the end of time.” It is a time for testing and improvement (note 4). Memento mori is a fitting medieval Latin phrase that is not distant from the prayers and songs of the hymnal: “Remember you must die” (note 5). Undisturbed by enlightenment notions of fundamental change, progress or evolution, it is a reminder that testing will come, and of the fleetingness of earthly pleasures and luxuries. It reinforces the conviction that suffering and loss are temporary and have a higher purpose.

Johann Cornies' office reported in January 1843 that Molotschna inhabitants “enjoyed a satisfactory state of health” for the previous year. “A total of 335 persons died, most of them children under the age of ten” (note 6). And that was a normal year.

We know that 39% of adult females buried by one Chortitza minister between 1837 and 1843 died in their forties or younger. Those under the age of 47 on this list gave birth on average every 2.25 years of marriage, and 48% percent of these children died before the death of the mother (note 7).

Moving are the diary entries of minister and teacher Jacob Epp (Chortitza Colony/ Judenplan) on his own daughter's sudden illness, and then the death of a 14-year-old in his school in 1852 (note 8):

Feb. 25: “Only God knows if she [daughter] will die. I would miss her terribly. She is ready to die and happy at the thought of being in heaven with a kindly Saviour, who loves children.”

Feb 28: “My pupil Klas Wiebe … died at the age of 14 years. He had been in school all day yesterday and then died after an illness of less than 23 hours. I used the opportunity to remind my pupils that they should be ready to die at any time.”

Another minister's diary (1837-43) records that 48% of children died before the death of the mother (note 9). And in 1859, for example, 75% of the 172 deaths in Chortitza were minors (note 10).

Mennonites in this era however were largely not opposed to state initiated medical interventions like vaccines or quarantines (note 11).

In the 18th and 19th century the term “gout” was broadly used as a collective term for a variety of children’s diseases that led to death, which could include symptoms such as seizures, paralysis and (fever) cramps, that were often associated with the plague. Other infant or childhood illnesses that resulted in death in nearby a nearby Lutheran village included measles, scarlet fever, spotted fever, bronchitis, typhus, cholera, pox and diarrhea (note 12).

Johannes Dyck, the District Mayor for the Am Trakt Mennonite daughter colony wrote the following diary entry: “On April 6, 1860, our son Johannes was born; in 1861 Marie, who died after nine months; in 1862 Dietrich, who was still-born; mother [wife] thought it was the midwife's fault. On July 22, 1864, a second Marie was born" (note 13).

The vital statistics kept their Elder C. Nickel show that between 1865 and 1874,

  • 49% of the deaths were of children under age one
  • 22% were between one and ten years old
  • Total: 71.7% of deaths were of children under 10
  • Annually 28 deaths, or about 1 every 13 days
  • Oldest person buried was 68 years old

The average age of death in the years 1865 to 1874 was twelve (note 14).

The symbol of an anchor—anchored in Christ—is found on many Russian Mennonite grave stones (note 15). Longtime Rudnerweide teacher Jakob Bräul wrote in 1856 that “one’s external morality is nothing, lacking both strength and anchor, without the inner renewal of the whole person.” In the face of evil vices and temptations, the goal of the Christian community and of the individual “is to be without blemish, as the Word of God commands,” Bräul emphasized according to the tradition, yet the rules on their own are weak (note 16).

At the conclusion of a person’s earthly journey, the exact years, months, and days lived were carefully recorded in diaries, letters and family records, including the years married and children born as appropriate.

There is a longer tradition that teaches that the dead are sleep in the eternal hands of God. The first Prussian Mennonite elder Dirk Philips (d. 1568; note 17), and 130 years later Danzig Flemish elder Georg Hansen (d. 1703; note 18), as well as others in the tradition like Pieter Jansz Twisck (d. 1636; note 19) taught that when a person dies, the soul sleeps in a kind of dormitory ("Ruhekämmerlein") in the hands of God until the real history altering Day of Judgement. The Christian who has died 'in Christ’ is in some way passive and asleep under his care (see Thess. 4:15; Acts 7:60). The Book of Revelation pictures the martyrs as resting from their labor and suffering, while longing for the final Judgement (Rev. 6:10-11; 14:13; note 20).

The events and gatherings around the holy days of the church calendar, together with the unending cycle of community weddings and funerals on family farms—largely organized by women—reinforced the conviction that in the vicissitudes of time their lives were anchored in God’s unchanging time in which nothing and no one is lost.

             ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: “Franz Heinrich Goertz,” GRanDMA #61901, www.grandmaonline.org.

Note 2: Based on G. Penner’s extractions, “Chortitza Colony Deaths Recorded in the Diaries of Jacob Wall (1832-53) and David Epp (1837-43),” http://www.mennonitegenealogy.com/russia/diarydeaths.htm.

Note 3: Cf. John B. Toews, “Childbirth, Disease and Death among the Mennonites in Nineteenth-Century Russia,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 60, no. 3 (1986), 450–468. A formula for infertility (or abortion?) from Dr. Wilhelm Töws, Rosenthal (Chortitza) is recorded in Diary of Jacob Wall 1824–1860 (German: https://chortitza.org/Eich/WallOr1.htm; https://chortitza.org/Eich/WallOr2.htm). Cf. Conrad Stoesz, “‘For women when their monthly period does not occur’: Mennonite Midwives and the Control of Fertility,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 34 (2016), 105–122, https://jms.uwinnipeg.ca/index.php/jms/article/view/1646.

Note 4: “Länder und Völkerkunde: Uebersicht der ausländischen Kolonien in Neu-Rußland.” St. Petersburgische Zeitschrift 3.2, vol. 14 (Leipzig, 1824), 184, https://chortitza.org/Pis/SPZ1824.pdf. On the theme of time, see James Urry, “Time and Memory: Secular and Sacred Aspects of the World of the Russian Mennonites and their Descendants,” Conrad Grebel Review 25, no. 1 (2007), 4–32, https://uwaterloo.ca/grebel/publications/conrad-grebel-review/issues/winter-2007/time-transcendent-and-worldly.

Note 5: see …

Note 6: Transformation on the Southern Ukrainian Steppe: Letters and Papers of Johann Cornies, vol. 2: 1836–1842, translated by Ingrid I. Epp; edited by Harvey L. Dyck, Ingrid I. Epp, and John R. Staples (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020) no. 710, p. 591, https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/100164/1/Southern_Ukrainian_Steppe_UTP_9781487538743.pdf.

Note 7: See note 9.

Note 8: A Mennonite in Russia: The Diaries of Jacob D. Epp, 1851–1880, translated and edited by Harvey L. Dyck (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 115. There is no GRanDMA entry for this youth.

Note 9: See G. Penner’s extractions, “Chortitza Colony Deaths,” based on Diaries of David Epp: 1837–1843, translated and edited by John B. Toews (Vancouver, BC: Regent College, 2000).

Note 10: Cf. entry for January 4, 1860 in A Mennonite in Russia: The Diaries of Jacob D. Epp.

Note 11: See previous posts on vaccines (forthcoming)

Note 12: For a list of the most deadly childhood diseases in the Lutheran village of Alexanderhilf from the 1830s to the 1860s, cf. Dmytro Myeshkov, Die Schawarzmeerdeutschen und ihre Welten: 1781–1871 (Essen: Klartext, 2008), 165. Cf. also John B. Toews, “Childbirth, Disease and Death among the Mennonites in Nineteenth-Century Russia,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 60 (1986), 450–468.

Note 13: January 28, 1888, Auszug aus dem Tagebuch von Johannes Dietrich Dyck (1826-1898), Oberschulze in Am Trakt Kolonie 1871-1898, translated from C. J. Dyck, ed., "A Pilgrim People," 200, https://chortitza.org/pdf/wfrs2.pdf.  For more on Am Trakt, see https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Am_Trakt_Mennonite_Settlement_(Samara_Oblast,_Russia); https://amtrakt.de/.

Note 14: Cornelius Nickel, Unser Blatt I, no. 8 (May 1926) 186, https://chortitza.org/Pis/UB25_08.pdf.

Note 15: Cf. John Longhurst, “Mennonite memorial to be unveiled in Ukraine,” Winnipeg Free Press (June 18, 2021), https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/life/faith/2021/06/18/mennonite-memorial-to-be-unveiled-in-ukraine.

Note 16: Jakob Bräul, “Die Moralität der hiesigen Bewohner,” December 20, 1856, Molotschna Teachers Reports, 1856-57. In Peter J. Braun Russian Mennonite Archive, file 1820, reel 52. From Robarts Library, University of Toronto.

Note 17: Dirk Philips, The Writings of Dirk Philips, 1504–1568, translated and edited by Cornelius J. Dyck et al. (Waterloo, ON: Herald, 1992; Kindle edition);

Note 18: Georg Hansen, Confession oder Kurtze und einfältige Glaubens-Bekänetenüsse derer Mennonisten in Preußen, so man nennet die Clarichen (N.p. 1678), http://pbc.gda.pl/dlibra/docmetadata?from=rss&id=35959.

Note 19: Pieter Twisck, "Confession of Faith (ca. 1600)," art. 31, reprinted in Van Braght, Martyrs Mirror, 406f. https://archive.org/details/TheBloodyTheaterOrMartyrsMirrorOfTheDefenselessChristians/page/n405.

Note 20: See also Mennonite theologian Thomas Finger, Christian Theology: An Eschatological Approach, vol. 1 (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1985), 141, https://archive.org/details/christiantheolog0000fing/page/140/mode/2up.





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