The Mennonite Church building at Schoensee, Molotschna was built in 1909, and was one of the most ornate Mennonite religious facilities in Russia. It was built in a neo-Gothic style, complete with Gothic-shaped windows and buttresses between the windows. Large ornate gateposts at the street complemented the design. In 1909 the church had 745 baptized members and six ministers. The seating capacity was 700. The interior had a fresco ceiling painted by an Italian artist. The building was closed in 1934 and turned into a granary and then into a clubhouse. It functioned again as a church for a brief period during WW II when the area was occupied by the German army.
Sadly, the building is now without a roof, some of the roof tiles manufactured by the brickyard of Toews and Enns of near-by Fabrikerweise can be found alongside the building, and a green forest inhabits the inside of the building.
The most diligent of readers will have found the Comments made by Wilma (Goerz) Turner on August 20/09 following Herb’s blog titled August 17, 2009 FUERSTENAU.
Perhaps Wilma needs an Introduction. Her paternal Grandmother was Susanna Klassen, an older sister to my mother. We called her Tante Susa. As many people know, my mother spent the years 1962 - 1969 collecting family history data. This was the pre-computer era and she wrote hundreds and hundreds of hand-written letters, with self-designed photo-copied forms to many very distant relatives in Canada, USA, South America and Germany, requesting people complete the forms and return them. As you can imagine this didn’t always happen. Then she repeated the requests. And she did collect a lot of data and compiled four large Registers, one for each of her four ancestral lines (Klassen, Dick, Goossen, Nickel). She had special hard cover books printed and then transferred the data into those books by hand. The last few generations appeared in each book, so it was an enormous amount of work. I’m not sure just when, but quite sometime after my mother’s death in 1970, Wilma Goerz, Tante Susa’s grandchild expressed an interest in entering my mother’s genealogical data into a software programme. I was living in Manitoba and heard about this, but had no idea what this meant or what it would lead to. Wilma worked at updating the data whenever possible. I believe there were about 5,000 names in my mother’s project. About 1997, George Dyck of Vineland, and now involved with the Mennonite Centre in Halbstadt, Molotschna copied the data for me to install into my first computer. I added the Fransen, Wichert and Funk data over the following years, and then proceeded adding Harold’s relatives: Regiers, Goertzens, Penner and Kroegers. This has became my retirement hobby. Wilma and I continue to share our interest in genealogy, updating data via email, although we rarely meet.
Although my mother and her family lived in Fuerstenau they attended the Mennonite Church in nearby Schoensee whenever this was possible. Consequently she was baptized there on June 9, 1924. Wilma’s Goerz ancestors had a very strong lineage in Schoensee.
I thank you for the introduction, Edith. I believe that it was in the mid '90s that I decided to copy your mother's carefully compiled information into my Family Tree Maker program. I actually used Uncle Frank's copies which he had meticulously photocopied, retaped and rebound. I believe those copies are presently in the care of Margaret Pritula (Liz Sawatsky Braun's daughter), who has also been bitten by the genealogy bug. I had become fascinated by the idea of genealogy at the tender age of 12 after seeing a blank family tree chart in our Sunday School "With" magazine. It showed the outgoing editor & incoming editors' family trees and how in a few spots their branches intertwined. That was fascinating to me! I started filling out the blank chart, and discovered that my Grandmother Weier (Susanna Warkentin) had many handwritten family papers to contribute, and so the deciphering began. Through my many years of research, I have discovered that my parents are actually 5th cousins! And my earliest date is in my paternal grandfather Franz Goerz' mother's Unruh line, a Heinrich Buller (born 1580 in Zurich, Switzerland)... not quite back to Adam yet! I have appreciated Edith as a sounding board, and a help in puzzling out various mysteries, although I think we create more than we solve!
ReplyDeleteAlso I've sent Edith an inside photo of the Schoensee church if anyone is interested in seeing that (I haven't quite figured out how to post here yet)