This fonds consists of diaries and other materials which provide details on everyday life, current events and business dealings. Tucked into some of the diaries are advertisements, notices, lottery tickets and other day-to-day notes. The diaries for 1907 and 1918 are missing. The diary for 1919 is incomplete and obviously written under difficult conditions on different notepads and scraps of paper. There is also a small notebook with calculations written in pencil.
This fonds contains information on the founding of a radio station in Altona, Manitoba, an autobiography of A.J. Thiessen, a portrait of Thiessen and a photo of his first bus. Much of the material documents Thiessen's community involvements.
This fonds consists of diaries and other documents which primarily document the life of Adina Janzen (nee Epp). It includes diaries covering 1940-1943 while she attended school in Kiev. Further diaries cover the period from 1943-1947 when Mennonites fled from Russia into Germany and their migration to Paraguay. These entries document her thoughts, feelings, and emotions during the migration. There are legal records pertaining to her birth and citizenship and family genealogical records compiled at various time which provide family background in Russia. The materials also cover the period after she immigrated to Canada.
This fonds consists of minutes from meetings, financial records, correspondence, photographs, insurance and employee records, reports, projects and proposals. The two artifacts consist of :
the corporation seal -treasurer's "for deposit only..." stamp
This fonds consists of materials regarding the life and work of Dr. Elmer Edger Ernest Reimer [“Al Reimer"], a scholar, a professor in the English Department of United College—the University of Winnipeg, a novelist, a writer of short stories and many articles, an historian, a stalwart Mennonite, a traveller, very involved in the Arts, and devoted to his family. The fonds is divided into eleven series:
Personal: early years and family, most correspondence, and the later years
Student days
University-teaching years
Low-German: the language, works, and writers
Research for Writing his Novel My Harp is Turned to Mourning and for his collection of short stories, Kleindarp
Drafts of Al Reimer’s novel My Harp is Turned to Mourning (1985)
Al Reimer’s transcription, editing, and translations work with A Russian Dance of Death (1977), No Strangers in Exile (1979), and Arnold Dyck’s works (1989)
Literature
Interest and Involvement in the Arts other than Literature
Al Reimer as a Leader of Tours to Europe and Russia (USSR)
This fonds contains a composite photograph consisting of 167 individual portraits of Mennonite men that served in the Imperial Russia's Forestry service at Razin, a photograph of teacher Heinrich Johan Dueck (1862-1922) with students of school(Dueck was a teacher in Kleefeld, Gnadental and Klippenstal, Molotschna), and a 1903 funeral photo of 18 year-old Heinrich Albrecht of Prangenau (South Russia) showing the coffin being transported with a horse drawn carriage. This fonds also includes background information on the Razin Forestei where members of the Warkentin and Albrecht family served plus genealogical information on the Albrecht, Peters, von Kampen, and Warkentin families. Some of the data is an update for the published family history book entitled, "John Warkentin and his Descendants 1820-1990".