Mary, Mary Quite...Haban

The difference between my family's remembered stories of the Habans' past and the factual accounts I was finding in my reading and research made me wonder just how connected my family actually was to possible Hutterite roots. My mother's memoir of her mother and father talked about their ancestors being relocated from Hanover, Germany, to the Slovak towns of Svätý Ján and Sobotište by Empress Maria Theresa, then ruler of what would become Austria-Hungary. Perhaps Grandma and Grandpa's parents and grandparents were newcomers to their hometowns, missing out on the 18^th century Jesuit push to make the Hutterites Catholic. But if so, why did their descendants identify as Haban, dress in the 20^th century much as the Haban had done in the 18^th and 19^th centuries? Why was the Slovak language they spoke filled with German words? And why was the Catholicism they professed and practiced made them appear as more than just “good Catholics”?

I started reading about Hutterites in any books I could find in the local libraries. Much of the historical Hutterite writings is, of course, written by Hutterites and Hutterite scholars who view Hutterite history, specifically the Haban part of it, from a faithful Hutterite point of view. According to them, the “true believers” are now living out God's calling in North and South Dakota, Montana, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. But the North American Hutterites did not completely forget their reprobate ancestors who had caved in to the demands of the Jesuits back in the old country in the 1700s. Several times in the 20^th Century, North American Hutterites visited the towns in Slovakia where Haban descendants still lived, curious to know what the descendants of those Hutterites who stayed behind in the 1700s had become. (More about those visits in a later post.) One book I was reading, John Hostetler's Hutterite Society, contained a photo of an old woman, according to the caption, a Hutterite descendant from the Slovak town of St. Johann taken during a 1970 visit. Something about the woman's face looked familiar, reminding me of my grandfather. St. Johann, the Germanic version of the Slovak Svätý Ján, was the town where Grandpa grew up. Maybe the woman in the photo was a relative, a cousin perhaps? I photocopied the picture and sent it to my mother. Mom spoke and wrote Slovak fluently and corresponded with several cousins living in Slovakia. She sent the picture to her cousin Marka who still lived in Svätý Ján, asking her if she recognized the woman in the picture. Her cousin wrote back (and this is the exact, translated quote): “You truly don't know who it is? Well, I'll tell you. It's my mother and your aunt...” The old woman in the photo was Grandpa's older sister Mary. My great aunt Mary's traditional Hutterite dress and head covering, her last name in the picture – Tschetter – the Hutterite spelling of the family name Cederle, her town of St. Johann and the recognition of her as a Hutterite descendant in the photo caption left no doubt – Grandpa's family, at least, was truly Haban.

Photo of Grandpa's sister, Mary, taken from the book Hutterite Society by John Hostetler, (1997)