52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Week 33 Prompt - Trouble Maker

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks

Week 33

Prompt - Trouble Maker

In general I do not think of Mennonites as trouble makers.  Their strict religious beliefs hardly leave room for troubles.  Further, Mennonites use a very effective tool in the way of punishment and that is 'excommunication”.  Upon excommunication, the errant member is excluded from all services of the church.  This includes communication with church members and often includes their own family.  They are shunned (boycotted) and not helped as they had been in the past in their communal colonies.  For example harvesting their crops alone without the use of communal harvesting machinery could cause them to lose the crop. Their businesses are boycotted which often meant that their business would surely fail.

This Newspaper Article from The Regina Leader Post on November 13, 1914 gives us a bit of insight of one cause and fall out of the excommunication of Jacob J. Heinrichs. He is not my ancestor as far as I know. 

Jacob J. Heinrichs used the court system to collect on business debt, failing to obey the Mennonite church rules by using a legal system outside of the Mennonite colony. But this excommunicated Mennonite trouble maker took it one step further by suing the bishop who excommunicated him.  What did he have to lose?  He was already excommunicated!  I am not sure of the outcome of this case.

The Mennonites keep only those individuals who obey and commune in social harmony with their colony.  The misbehaving heretical individuals are swept away in order to keep the Mennonites homogeneous in their beliefs with no room for individual interpretation.

This happens less often now but certainly it was a thing at the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th century.  Despite the colony and their bishops best efforts their members slowly assimilated to the world outside of the colony.  This resulted in “The Old Colony Mennonites” of Saskatchewan to once again pack up and move south to Mexico in the 1920's.  Just like the move from Prussia to Russia and then on to Canada; they were in search of religious freedom that allowed them to speak their German and more importantly, teach their own children in their language and with their own curriculum as set out by the Mennonite Teachings. 

My father and his parents were not among the group that moved on to Mexico.  My father and some of the family eventually moved to a house in Saskatoon.  I am not sure The Mennonite religion played a part in their lives afterwards.

Wendy