by Helen Rose Pauls

Ben Braun is the friendly man often spotted in the archives, working on a computer. He is in charge of the MHS of BC website and is the treasurer. Ben is on the Cemetery Committee, indexing and photographing gravestones. He also scans Mennonitische Rundschau into the computer. "Twenty years are done," he says, "with another 110 years to go." Ben joined the board of MHSBC when the former treasurer, Henry Martens, asked him to take his place.

Ben's parents, Ike Braun and Anne Reimer, were the first to be married in the Sardis [now Greendale] M.B.Church building in 1940. Ben arrived in 1942 and lived his early years in Chilliwack. Soon after his birth, his dad had to go to the CO camp in Radium Hot Springs. His most unforgettable adventure was the flood of '48. "We had 13 feet of water at our farm on Chadsey road and the house shifted on its foundation, held only by the hydro wires. The chicken barn floated over the creek and when the water went down it was half in and half out. One day after the water went down my dad and I were checking the property and dad got a telegram telling him that his brother John had died in a mining accident…my earliest memory of seeing adults cry." The family was resettled to Cultus Lake and later the hopyard cabins, where his sister Julie [Floodie], a red-haired beauty, was born. Two more children, Walter and Ken, joined the family, but all of Ben's siblings and his parents have passed on, leaving him the only remaining family member.

Ben began school at Greendale Elementary and remembers teachers Ella Adrian and Kay Fast. He attended Chilliwack Junior High, Sardis Junior High and later Chilliwack Senior High where he met Mary Luella Hildebrandt from Eden Mennonite Church. It was a mixed marriage [MB/GC]. Ben took an Industrial Electronics correspondence course from DeVry Institute and ended up computer programming in Toronto and has been enjoying that ever since. Karen and Janice were born there. In 1980, the Brauns moved to Langley, transferred back to Toronto in 1987, and came back to Clearbrook in 2001, closer to their aging mothers. In 1992, Ben began Ben Braun Software and served a variety of clients in mainframe computer programming and web design, including the gideons.ca website.

Ben and Mary's daughter Karen is now a computer programmer for the Bank of Canada and lives near Ottawa with daughters Natalie and Ashley and husband Dan Westrup. Janice, a wildlife biologist, and Steve Arndt live in the West Kootenays with children Justin and Bethany.

Ben says he often has to spell his last name and people either call him Brown or Brawn. "My dad thought that Anglos should get our name right, as they managed Audi, Strauss and Chrétien [Kretchen]. Then I noticed that in Low German it was pronounced Brun, so if we can't get it right in Low German, how can we expect the English to get it right?"

"My favorite color is brown of course, and my favorite car is still my first one: a two-tone 53 Meteor, automatic, V8. My hobbies are genealogy, computers and digital photography, all of which I can pursue at the archives.