Mennonite Weekly Review

Richard Thiessen recently reached an important milestone, but his celebration was muted. That’s because everyone was asleep.

From his home in Abbotsford, B.C., on Feb. 20 at 11:44 p.m., Thiessen posted the 14,160th and final article from the print version of the five-volume Mennonite Encyclopedia onto the Web site of the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online.

“You wish you could wake up everyone in the house and say, ‘Guys, I’m finished,’ ” said Thiessen, who is also GAMEO’s associate managing editor. Instead, he said, he just went to bed.

His post, an article about the Alsatian Amish-Mennonite community of Rauschenburg, concluded 12 years of work by Canadian and American volunteers.

They have now scanned, edited and put on the GAMEO Web site the entire five-volume Mennonite Encyclopedia — from Aachen (city in northwestern Germany) to Zwolse Vereniging (Dutch Mennonite congregation) — so it can be accessed from anywhere by anyone with an Internet connection.

By day, Thiessen is library director at Columbia Bible College in Abbotsford, but he is a self-described night owl. He does his GAMEO work after 10 p.m., when his three sons and wife are asleep, staying up as late as 2 a.m.

“That’s when I find I am the most productive,” Thiessen said. “I have a nice, quiet house to work in for a few hours each night.”

GAMEO was started in 1996 by the Mennonite Historical Society of Canada as a project to put Canadian Mennonite information online, including pertinent Mennonite Encyclopedia articles. The Mennonite Church USA Historical Committee and the Mennonite Brethren Historical Commission soon joined as the project expanded to make the entire encyclopedia available on the Internet.

Now that it’s completed, GAMEO is moving into a new phase. The first four volumes of the Mennonite Encyclopedia were published in the 1950s, and a supplement came out in 1990. So the push now is to update existing articles and add new ones.

To do that, GAMEO is working with regional organizations to generate new biographical and congregational history material about their particular areas. In Canada, that is being done through the five provincial Mennonite historical societies. In the United States, the first participant is a group organized through the Lancaster (Pa.) Mennonite Historical Society. There also have been conversations with groups in Indiana, Kansas and Oregon.

About 1,000 new articles have already been added.

Another new initiative is to make the encyclopedia available on DVD, particularly for Amish, Hutterites and conservative Mennonite groups that use computers but not the Internet.

“We hadn’t particularly thought of them,” said Sam Steiner of Waterloo, Ont., who volunteers as GAMEO’s managing editor. “But when we started talking to a few groups they expressed interest.”