Leavings: My Mennonite Family History

My grandma's (mom's mom's) side is Mennonite. The Mennonites are a religious group which descended from the Anabaptists, similar to Hutterites and the Amish. You can take a look around online for the details of the religion, the religion's beliefs, and their larger history, but recently I've been thinking about this side of my family and how much we've moved around and left our communities behind. My original Mennonite ancestors were likely from the Netherlands or nothern Germany, many of whom were forced to leave due to religious persecution. A large group, which nowadays is called the Russian Mennonites but who spoke a form of German, ended up moving to the Vistula Delta area in modern day Poland. A couple hundred years later, they took an offer from Catherine the Great of Russia to settle "New Russia" in what is now southern Ukraine. My family specifically lived in/near Odesa, Ukraine.

My grandma Lina, my mom Natalie, and me!

Now we get to my specific family history. My great grandma Rita left the Mennonite community to marry a non-Mennonite man (scandalous!) who was a Soviet engineer. They had one child (my grandma Lina). Lina's dad left to Russia to work and she was separated from Rita, possibly due to health issues, resulting in Lina ending up in an orphanage. Her grandma from the Mennonite community eventually found her and brought her back there, before taking the family to the Neuland Colony in Paraguay to escape Europe due to Religious persecution and a purge of German descendents and German speakers from Russia. Eventually, a family member who was a nurse working in Canada was able to sponsor the family, and they moved to Delta, BC, where a large group of my Mennonite family still lives. Lina, however, left the community and married my grandpa, and they lived together and had children together in Burnaby. My mom ended up being the only one of her siblings to leave Burnaby long-term, moving to Vancouver Island, where I was born. Now I live in Vancouver and am contemplating my career and my future and where it will take me!

One aspect of this history is colonization. While Mennonites have often been forced to move to survive, they have still taken part in colonization in the areas they settle. One example of Mennonite colonization that I learned about while researching this topic is environmental damage in Latin America. My family lived in Paraguay briefly, but other Mennonites colonized as well, and many stayed there. Many Mennonites historically made a living through agriculture since they were skilled farmers, sometimes even settling and farming in areas with poor soil that no one else could farm. This tradition continued in South America, where their clearing of land for farming has contributed to the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest.