The Daniel B. Swartzendruber Collection contains numerous documents, which shed light on 19th-century Amish life in America, particularly the Johnson County, Iowa and Somerset County, Pennsylvania communities. Thanks to the interest in the church and its history of at least five generations of Swartzendrubers the Archives has this sizable collection. Other material of the Swartzendruber family can be found at the archives of the Iowa Mennonite Historical Society. In an attempt to aid the researcher working with this collection, this description of the collection has been prepared.
A brief genealogical chart (see Box 1/Folder1) affords an overview of the relationships of the various people who wrote or whom are written about, in the collection. (The names of the collection’s significant writers are in red). Many of the dates on the chart come directly from the collection and so there may be some minor discrepancies in the dates, particularly those of the earlier generations. It is not completely clear that the Abner Yoder who is named on the chart is the same man whom Jacob Swartzendruber visited in Somerset County (the Glades) in 1860, and whom later moved to Iowa. It seems likely that he is the one so therefore without verifying the information fully he was placed on the chart. This chart is not included in this inventory, but is available upon request.
The chart hosts different name spellings from what they are normally in the documents. The spellings for the same person do vary in the documents so consistency was kept by using the spellings found in the Mennonite Quarterly Review and the Mennonite Bibliography. This helped also in allowing for only one spelling in a particular generation. In order to save space only initials in this paper will be used when referring to Jacob Schwarzendruber {JS} (1800-1868), Friedrich Schwartzendruber {FS}(1825-1895), Jacob Friedrich Swarzendruber {JFS} (1851-1924), Daniel B. Swartzendruber {DBS} (1875-1950), and Elmer G. Swartzendruber {EGS} (1890-19??).
The collection has a somewhat arbitrary organization but one should be able to locate any item without much difficulty by using the folder listing Basically, the organization follows JFS’s copy book {Folder 2} and then the additional materials in EGS’s transcriptions {Folder 3} and JFS’s “Register der alten Schriften” {Folder 4}. Then there are additional documents, family history materials, and some of DBS’s personal material.
In order to identify the documents which have been copied or identified in JFS’s or EGS’s transcriptions or the “Register der alten Schriften” those materials have been listed with numbers (Box 1 / Folder 1) and will refer to those numbers in the folder descriptions.
Researchers should note that the date span includes the original dates of documents copied into copy books and collected documents. The record keeping activity of the Swartzendruber family extends only back to the 19th century.
Swartzendruber, D. B. (Daniel B.), 1875-
