Moscow Project
Your Society is a participant in a project to microfilm a large volume of Mennonite related archival material discovered in Moscow at the State Archive of the Russian Federation. This material was found by, and the recovery effort is led by Dr. Paul Toews of Fresno.
These records are unique in that they pertain to the work of All-Russian Mennonite Agricultural Union. (The familiar German acronym is AMLV.) Most of the records retrieved to date have pertained to the Ukrainian Mennonites. The AMLV was concerned with Mennonite interest in Russia and Siberia. Therefore this information will be totally new.
The collection consists of 101 reels of microfilm. (93 reels of AMLV records and 8 reels of American Mennonite Relief records). These were collected from the Russian State Archives in December 2005 and transported to Fresno. We will shortly be receiving our copy.
These records were created by Mennonites in the 1920’s, seized by the NKVD in 1928 and kept by them until 1951. In 1951 they were transferred to the State Archives, and in the early 1990’s declassified. Now, after more than seventy-five years, even if only on film rather than original, they are coming home to their rightful owners.
Edward Hildebrand
Inmagic Project
The Board is pleased to announce the introduction of a major electronic innovation for our Centre at Garden Park Tower. Recently we acquired an archival indexing software called InMagic, a state of the art, software program commonly used for finding information in archival collections.
This software requires a very large investment of time to enter all of the relevant details so that our collection becomes electronically searchable. An implementation group of eight volunteers led by Erica Suderman are presently laying the foundation for this project.
Completing this project will take several years. The first part of the procedure is to ensure that our Centre has legal custody of the records. (If you have been a donor of materials to our Centre, you will shortly be contacted in this regard.) The next task is to arrange and describe all of our records according to the Canadian Council of Archives (RAD) standards. In all of these changes every effort will be made to protect the integrity of records entrusted to us, and where confidentially has been requested, to ensure that any use of these records will conform to the wishes of our donors.
Presently some 200 people visit our Centre each month. Our concern is to provide visitors with a variety searching options. The "InMagic" software is primarily designed for archival searches. The GRANDMA database (Genealogical Registry and Database of Mennonite Ancestry) with more than 800,000 names will continue to be our main source for genealogical searching. Our library books have been catalogued and entered into a separate software package. With the completion of the InMagic project, finding information in our Centre will be considerably enhanced.
The Board wishes to express particular thanks to Erica Suderman and her group of volunteers for undertaking the massive InMagic implementation project.
David Giesbrecht
Peter Bargen Project
The Peter Bargen Project is based on some 400 letters received by Dr. Bargen’s parents and subsequently edited and translated by Dr. Peter Bargen and his wife. Before his untimely passing, Dr. Bargen was interviewed on videotape by Ruth Derksen Siemens, commenting on these letters. From the four and one half hours of taping, a Promo Video has been prepared for the purpose of finding a major producer of an hour long TV documentary. This effort is still in progress.
In the past few months Ruth Siemens has located and interviewed on videotape a Miss Lena Regehr in Cologne Germany. Miss Regehr is a survivor of the Soviet Gulag and one of the correspondents of the original letters to the Bargens. These interviews will be added to the Bargen collection to build an even more dramatic documentary.
Edward Hildebrand