Mennonite & Anabaptist

In what looks like another affinity fraud scheme targeting Plain Anabaptist people, the Department of Justice is seeking the arrest of a man who collected over $30 million over a decade-long span – telling donors the money was for Bibles and other Christian literature to be distributed in China. Jason Gerald Shenk allegedly got at least some of his money (and perhaps most of it)…

A new edition of the The Journal of Plain Anabaptist Communities has been released. The Journal is published twice yearly and is available for free online. As the title suggests, it covers all manner of research subjects pertaining to Amish, Plain Mennonites, and other Anabaptist peoples. Check out the latest issue here, or the full archives here. So what’s in the latest edition? This intro,…

From time to time you might see claims that Amish live in Mexico. However, this is not the case. There are no established Amish communities in the country. There was an Amish presence there, however, nearly 100 years ago. Amish lived in Mexico for about six years in the 1920s, having left Ohio due to issues over state school requirements. This is the only community…

 In this video I show you more of my visit to the horse-and-buggy Mennonite community in Buffalo Valley (Union County, PA). You’ve already seen the posts on the Mennonite bakery and market – they appear here too as well. Additional things you’ll see in this video are a visit with to an old cemetery in Buffalo Valley where 19th-century Amish settlers are buried, some…

As promised, following the look inside a plain Mennonite market, let’s check out the bakery. As you might recall this was found just next door to the market in the Snyder County, PA Stauffer Mennonite community (Port Trevorton area). We were met by the aroma of what I thought was apple cobbler as we exited the market, and promptly located the bakery entrance. This ended…

While in Lancaster County I took a trip with a friend and his son to an Old Order (horse-and-buggy) Mennonite community in the Buffalo Valley area of Pennsylvania. It’s about a two and a half hour drive and there had been inclement weather that day, which worsened as we headed further north. We did get a nice visit at the community which I’ll go into…

Do the Amish live in Ireland? There are no Old Order Amish communities in Ireland, but Beachy Amish do live there. The question is revisited today by irishcentral.com in an article titled “Did you know Ireland has an Amish community?” The Christian Fellowship of Dunmore East, Co. Waterford is Ireland’s only Amish-Mennonite community. It was founded in 1992 by William McGrath, an Irish American who…

The Young Center at Elizabethtown College provides annual Amish population numbers, with totals for each state, province and so on. But they also have figures for the Old Order Mennonite population, a group similar to Amish in many ways (and in some cases living next door to them as neighbors). According to their latest tallies, the horse-and-buggy Old Order Mennonites number over 38,000 across their…

Jim Halverson shares a visit he made back in the fall to the Wakarusa area of northern Indiana. This town lying north of Nappanee is in the vicinity of a small Old Order Mennonite community. Jim made two interesting stops while in the area, as you’ll see below. Instead of trick-or-treating on Halloween, I attended the Wakarusa Driving Horse Auction. Wakarusa is about 15 miles…