Hello, my name is Marvin Rempel. I was born in a Paraguayan Mennonite colony and raised in Canada. I live in the suburbs near Vancouver, BC, Canada. I have been an amateur genealogist since 2002.
The purpose of this blog is to explore my Russian Low German Mennonite roots.
As a child, I was told that my grandparents had left the Soviet Union in 1929. Beyond that one simple fact, I knew almost nothing about our family's Russian history. I have always had a burning curiosity and desire to learn about our family's Russian history.
While my mother claims to have no interest in genealogy (I believe otherwise), she says that my obsession with genealogy reminds her of her father.
My maternal grandfather died when I was a young teenager. Growing up, I remembered him as a quiet man with a quiet smile. His wife had sparkling eyes and an infectious laughter when she handed out rosette chocolates to her grandchildren who could no longer adequately converse with her in her beloved Plautdietsch.
My passion for family history and genealogy was lit by finding my grandparents names on an internet list: The 1930 Mennonite refugee passenger lists to Paraguay. It would be reinforced by finding my maternal and paternal grandfathers' photos taken at Mölln, Germany as they prepared to embark to Paraguay in 1930 on a Mennonite archival web site that no longer exists.
My maternal grandfather's personal life story that was typed up in 1972 and his handwritten family genealogy mysteriously supplied by my mother would become one of my first major sources in building the family tree and the family Russian story.
The family's Russian story was very nearly lost with the struggle to survive in the early years of the Fernheim and Friesland Mennonite colonies in Paraguay.
My parents' lives were consumed with surviving the present and building a better future for their children. For my parents, there was no time to consider the past and distant lives of their parents and grandparents. They had been born and raised in Paraguay. It was all they knew.
My mother's grandparents had been dead for at least 15 years in the distant lands of Tsarist and Soviet Russia before she was even born. Stories about Russia were totally alien.
Like my mother, my father's grandparents, with the exception of one grandmother, had been long dead in foreign Russian soil. While my father's surviving grandmother lived with the family until she passed, he lived with the negative imprints that Russia and the Soviet Union had left on his father, my grandfather.
My grandfather had lived in a world of insecurity, violence, and death. My grandfather had lost his father as a toddler. He struggled to establish a life in a new Mennonite colony on the Siberian steppes as Russia’s revolutionary period began in the early 20th century. He would survive the many Russian revolutions of the early 20th century, live through World War I, survive the major Russian famine of 1920-21 that became the genesis of the MCC, and would involuntarily participate in the Russian civil war as a member of the White army following the final Bolshevik revolution. In the newly formed Soviet Union, he would become one of the “former people” and a “kulak” targeted for “liquidation”. During Stalin’s forced march to collectivization in 1929, he would leave Siberia. With no other options, he took his young family to the Paraguayan Chaco, “The Green Hell” to escape arrest, exile, and probably death. This life left a deep imprint, not all positive.
So today, in the comfort of a peaceful, secure life in Canada where hunger is not embedded in daily life, survival is not a question, and death no longer lingers in the background awaiting its next victim, I am trying to resurrect the family's Russian story and connect to the stories of my grandparents, great grandparents, and beyond.