Ten Thousand Russians in North Dakota
In the tiny town of Kief, North Dakota stands the first Russian Baptist church built in the US.
Founded in 1901 and originally named Liberty Baptist, it was established by Ukranian Stundist immigrants, chiefly farmers, fleeing religious persecution. The church was moved in the 1930s to its current spot, about two miles from its original location in Dogden Township, to make it easier for older parishioners to attend services in winter. It’s architectural features include the familiar hipped-roof brought by Ukranian immigrants.
In June of 1922, 1,200 Baptists from around the world attended the American Baptist Home Mission Society’s annual meeting in Max, North Dakota. With them was Richard J. Inke, invited by the Mission as general missionary for Russians. The visits the delegation made as part of the meeting included the nearby “Dogden Russian Church”.
Inke gave a thoughtful report of the meeting, and of the Russian immigrants in North Dakota. Inke wrote that at the time, there were some ten thousand Russians in North Dakota, including 219 Russian Baptists. After six years of crop failures, many of the local Russian-American farmers (like so many others) were heavily in debt.
The state had a single Russian Baptist missionary; Inke encouraged the Society to send another to support their parishioners and churches. This probably was not what they were hoping for; it appears the Home Mission Society had invited Inke to represent as a “general missionary for Russians” at the meeting in hopes he’d stay on. But Richard was completing a graduate fellowship at Newton in MA (and also taking Russian at Harvard). His brother Janis was pastor at the Riga, Latvia Baptist church, and his other brother and sister were doing mission work in Brazil. The call of academic and mission work in Brazil eventually won out, and he took the post of Professor of Church History at the Rio Baptist College in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
The tiny Ukranian Baptist church in the tiny town of Kief stands today, a hundred years after the 1922 Home Mission Society annual meeting brought 1,200 Baptists from around the world to worship and discuss the work of the Home Missions.
Iņķis brothers: Treasures from the digital archives
In genealogy research, it’s always worth searching for digital versions of books, letters, and periodicals held by national archives or libraries. This includes both local and international archives. The wealth of information kept in these archives can provide rich insights into both specific research subjects and their local historical contexts.
The National Digital Library of Latvia provided insights today for the Iņķis family members I’ve been researching. The library is free to search, and provides a large (and growing) archive of periodicals, newspapers, books, and more. https://gramatas.lndb.lv/
Little Birds
Cover of the 1895 Little Book of Birds.
Today’s finds included:
Maza putnu grāmatiņa : putniņu apraksti (1895), (Little Book of Birds: Descriptions of Birds): a little book written by Janis Iņķis.
Mūsu bērnos mūsu nākamība (In Our Children Our Future) (1909), also by Jānis.
It also included an encyclopedia (!) entry for Jānis’ brother Richard Jēkabs Iņķis, who was also a preacher. I’d known that Richard attended seminary in the United States before relocating to Brazil, but this entry gave much more detail, noting that he graduated from Newton Theological Seminary in 1915. With that information, I quickly found a graduation notice in the Boston Globe. It noted that not only did Richard graduate, he gave a graduation address, entitled “The Awakening of Modern Russia”.
Colby Hall
Newton Theological School, circa 1913.
This is an especially interesting title, given that in May-July of 1915 the Russian Supreme Command evacuated around 500,000 Latvians from Courland, in advance of the German invasion. It then shipped 30,000 railway cars full of resources and munitions out of Riga, Latvia’s largest city, along with all its factory workers. Riga was devastated by the loss of industrial manufacture.
It was also during this time that his uncle, Karolis Iņķis, was preaching (and perhaps teaching) in the Evangelical Christian community in St. Petersburg.
Richard graduated from Newton’s undergraduate program in June, 1915, after studies at Rochester Theological Seminary’s German Department, as well as the Porto Alegre Seminary in Brazil.(1)
So, I’m quite interested to see what Richard’s perspectives may have been on current events. Among my current research tasks is not outreach to Andover Newton Seminary at Yale (Newton merged with Andover in 1965, and became Yale’s seminary for congregational ministry), to determine if they have a copy of Richard’s graduation address in their archives, for
References
(1) The Institution Bulletin, Newton Theological Institution, 1913, p15. Accessed via Internet Archive 2 Dec, 2024. url: https://archive.org/details/institutionbulle0006newt/
Edward Boening appointed Western Union Superintendent
It's well-known family lore that the Rolla-Chicago branch of the Boenings were heavily involved in the growth of the telegraph and telephone industries in the first half of the 20th century.
Edward Adolph Boening,
From Telegraph and Telephone Age, Aug. 16, 1910, p.544:
Mr. Edward Boening who has recently been appointed superintendent of the Western Union Telegraph Company at Seattle is one of the younger men in the telegraph service who have succeeded in attaining prominent positions by reason of perseverance and hard work. He was born at Rolla, MO, November 28, 1874 and became a messenger at Chicago for the Western Union Telegraph Company when only twelve years of age. From that branch of the service, he advanced to the delivery and bookkeeping departments and in 1899 was attached to the office of Superintendent F. H. Tubbs at Chicago. While there he held the claim, estimate and requisition clerkships thus gaining a valuable executive experience.
On March 1, 1903, he was appointed chief clerk in the office of Superintendent C. F. Ames at Boston, March 1, 1905, he became an inspector of the company and on December 1, 1906 was advanced to the assistant superintendency at Boston. On August 1, 1909, he was transferred to the Pacific Coast as assistant to the General Superintendent at San Francisco which position he held at the time of his present advancement.