Little Known Facts about The Amish and the Mennonites; A Study of the Social Customs and Habits of Pennsylvania's "Plain People"

Harrisburg, PA: The Aurand Press, 1939. Unknown printing. Wraps. Good. 32 pages. Illustrated front cover. Illustrations. Footnotes. No dust jacket as issued. Cover has a scuff and some other wear, soiling, and creasing. Name in ink on front cover. Cover has the copyright date is 1938 there is information on the first page dated 1939. The author was a member of the Pennsylvania German Folklore Society. This work was privately printed. (In preparing this study of the "plain people" the author has had opportunity to draw heavily from a general knowledge of them, by intimate contact and otherwise, as well as from a rich store of information to be found in numerous books and magazines, and such as issue from the pens of various contributors to the German folk societies. These would be too numerous to mention here, though it is deemed fitting to give general credit to them in this way, since they justify many of our findings, and in turn they authenticate their own). Although the issue of the ancestry requirement for regular membership of the Pennsylvania-German Society seemed to be decided at the foundational meeting and confirmed in its articles of incorporation, it was not. It continued to smolder underground over the years and reappeared in 1935 in the organization of the Pennsylvania German Folklore Society, which did not require proof of descent from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German or Swiss immigrants as a condition for membership. The place of the dialect, not only in the daily lives of the people, but also as a vehicle for literary expression, also continued to trouble Pennsylvania Germans long after the founding of the Pennsylvania German Society in 1891. Many discovered that it had an inner beauty which justified its use in prose and poetry, as well as in speech, and that it deserved to be studied and preserved in its pure form. This conviction was another factor which led to the formation of the Pennsylvania German Folklore Society in 1935. On May 4, 1935, the Pennsylvania German Folklore Society was formed in Allentown, Pennsylvania to collect and preserve the contributions of the Pennsylvania Germans. The Folklore Society did not restrict full membership to those of Pennsylvania German ancestry. Like the Pennsylvania German Society, the Pennsylvania German Folklore Society issued annual volumes, the first in 1936 covering dialect poems of Charles Calvin Ziegler, papers by Joseph Downs on the Millbach House and on the Pennsylvania German Galleries in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a paper by W. J. Hinke and J. B. Stoudt on German immigrants from Zweibruecken, 1728-49, and a catalogue of the Pennsylvania Folk Art Exhibition held that year in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.