Mementos
From My Pennsylvania Dutch or German
Ancestry
This is
the personal web page of Southern Illinois University's Professor
Emeritus Ronald Ray Schmeck, also a certified Pennsylvania
German, or in the
words of my college friends, a certified "Dutchman." After I
retired from the Psychology Department at Southern Illinois University,
I started using this page to talk
about my childhood experience with
the
Pennsylvania Dutch culture. If your family
tree
or genealogy includes some Pennsylvania Dutch roots,
you may be curious as to what your ancestors experienced as they were
"growing up Dutch" and what culture might have been transmitted to
you. Many of the old ones were eager to distance
themselves from German ancestry, because the Pennsylvania Dutch were
often viewed with suspicion in the years surrounding the World
Wars. Many discouraged their children from speaking the dialect,
or deitsch
as they called it. Sometimes associates at work or
fellow students in school mocked them if they spoke with an accent or
had a funny name. If they had an accent, they tried to lose it as
fast as possible. Now there seems to be a lot of people with some
Dutch
in their genealogy wondering what aspects of their forgotten family
culture might
have influenced their personalities.
I grew up near that beautiful section of
Pennsylvania's Berks
County known as the Oley Valley. My parents
could speak deitch, and they told me a lot of stories about their own
ancestry. I attended a little one-room grade school with eight
grades in a building no bigger than the living room of a modern "trophy
home." Nevertheless, when I retired at the age of 58, I
had a Ph.D. in
Psychology and thirty-three years experience as a Professor teaching
Psychology at Southern Illinois University. This was a rare
phenomenon in my childhood neighborhood, but then I was one of the
fancy
Dutch,
and I left the neighborhood.
I want to give people my impression of values
I was taught while growing up Dutch. For example, people think
sustainable
or organic agriculture is a new idea, but all the farmers I
knew had been practicing it for generations. Also, people
speak of alternative medicine, natural remedies, holistic healing,
connecting body-mind-spirit, faith healing, organic diet, nutritional
therapy, and health foods as though they are all new ideas. Well,
I'm
here to tell you a woman who lived right near my home in Pennsylvania's
Oley
Hills practiced all those things during the Revolutionary War in the late
1700's. Her name was Mountain
Mary, and she was
a
famous Pennsylvania Dutch faith healer or pow wow doctor or
braucher. Hex signs aren't related to pow wow or hexerei but the
tourists think they are. Berks County organizes "Hex Tours" to
see the beautiful folk
art on the side of barns.
I thought my
personal history might give
me a unique perspective on my
past. If you want to communicate an impression,
or the flavor or feel of an experience rather than the facts and
figures,
then it's often better to tell stories. I will be doing just that
on this
web page. Some of my material will come from my two recent novels about the
"fancy Dutch." Click here- The
Other Side of ...and Further From...the Middle.
I would like to thank Southern Illinois University
for it's support both before and after retirement. I have worked
here for thirty five years and continue to enjoy the support of the
University even after retiring from active teaching.
©2005 (email)
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highlighted links in text, then click Home
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