Chapter 3 Heinrich Schmidt's Family 1850

The Birth of Abraham
So there was Heinrich living in the south of Russia in 1850. He had come to Rueckenau as a boy of 18 in 1811. Now he moved a few miles away to live in Schardau with his wife Katharina Funk and their 2 children.
And that is where our great-grandfather Abraham Schmidt was born on July 23, 1850. Heinrich was 57 and Katharina was 43 when their son Abraham was born. They also had an older son Heinrich and a daughter Katharina.

(Yes, I know. A lot of people with the same name. Now you can see why nicknames were very popular. They would call someone by the nickname of a physical feature, a job or a hobby, etc.)

In a letter dated May 5, 1948, A.A. Smith wrote to his niece Jean, "My father (meaning Abraham) had only one brother with two sons, Henry and Abraham respectively."
I was confused by all these Henrys and Abrahams also. But recently I found Abraham's older brother Heinrich, the one that A. A. Smith was writing about. And I found 3 generations of his children. They live in Nebraska now.

Daily Life
Abraham's diary is written in High German. Low German was a spoken language used in everyday life. It wasn't a written language, so Abraham probably went to school, as most children in the Mennonite community did, in order to learn to write.

Why did they have two languages? And why didn't they speak Russian or Polish since that's where they lived?
Because many Mennonites viewed change as potentially detrimental to their religious integrity, the original Dutch Mennonites of the 1600's resisted the change to the use of High German in their church service even while living in German-speaking areas. They preferred the language of their home in the lowlands of Holland. That language was called Low German or "Plattdeutsch". It wasn't until 1760, one hundred years after their arrival in German-speaking Poland, that the Dutch Mennonites finally allowed German to be used in church. But they still kept the Low German for everyday speech. The same thing happened when English was introduced into the church service in the 1930's in the United States. The Mennonites continued to use books with High German on one side and English on the other.

Henry H. Thesman and wife Sara Jantzen

Some Russian ways were adopted by individual families. Dorothy remembers her grandfather Henry H. Thesman playing Russian gypsy tunes on his violin. With Russian-style soft slippers on his feet, Grandpa Thesman rosined up his bow and let the dust fly as he sang the tunes in Russian.


Next will be: What was daily life like for Abraham Schmidt when he was a child?