Summarized from the article "Joseph and Elisabeth Mündlein, Amish Mennonite Leaders in Galicia and Poland" by Jerold A. Stahly published in the January 1990 issue of Mennonite Family History.
Joseph and Elizabeth Mündlein were leaders among the Amish Mennonites who ultimately settled in Michaelsdorf Poland. Events in their lives have been documented in the following sources, all but three in German:
Fritz Seeveld, Quellenbuch sur deutschen Ansseidlung in Galizien unter Kaiser Joseph II, 1935, p. 162..Peter Bachmann, Mennoniten in Kleinpolen, 1934, p. 137.
Martin Schrag, The European History of the Swiss Mennonites From Volhynia, p. 30.
P. P Wedel, Kurze Geschichte der aus Wolhynien, Russland nach Kansas ausgewanderten Schweizer-Mennoniten, 1929, p.13.
J. A. Stucky, "The Story of Joseph Mendelheim," Mennonite Weekly Review, March 1, 1951, p. 3.
Seelen Liesste Kotosofka, p.1 This is found at the Mennonite Library and Archives, North Newton, Kansas. It is a bound manuscript, 39.
Ezra J. Kanagy, Two Old Letters by Hans Nafsiger (1782), 1983, pp. 11, 21.
Walter Kuhn, "Geschicte der Mennoniten in Kleinpolen," Deutsche Blätter in Polen, v. 9/10, September and October, 1928.
Hulda Kopper and P. P. Voran, A Genealogy of the Voran Family, revised by Lois and Phil Stump, 1971, p. 4.
Martin H. Schrag, The European History of the Swiss Mennonites, Swiss Mennonite Cultural & Historical Association, 1974.
The exact place of origin for Joseph Mündlein is not known. It is variously attributed to Austria, Bavaria and the Netherlands. Seefeld says that Joseph Mündlein came from the Gründstadischen, or Gründstadtisch which is in the Kurpfalz or Palatinate. Various traditions have him from a wealthy Catholic family, possibly nobility. Walter Kuhn reported that Joseph Mündlein promised to lend a group of Lutherans the money to build a church when he received an expected inheiritance. According to a letter written by one of the Palatinate Amish, Jakob Müller, Joseph Mündlein had been a "chief magistrate" or "mayor" of some locality which he did not name.
Elisabeth Maurer/Mauer may have come from an Amish family living in Dalsberg Herschaft, near Grundstadt, the same area of the Palatinate from which Joseph Mundlein possibly originated. According to the Seelen Liesste Kotosofka which is a register of Swiss-Volhynian Mennonite families, Joseph Mündlein and Elisabeth Maurer were married on November 18, 1781. Johann Maurer and Anna Marie Maurer Gengerich who were likely a brother and a sister of Elizabeth Maurer moved to Galicia in 1785 after the Mündleins had moved there in 1784. Another family register records five sons and two daughters. None of the sons survived childhood, but through Anna Mündlein (12 July 1785 &endash; 15 Jan. 1829) who married Andreas Flickinger 2 Jan 1802 and Katherina Mündlein (16 Jan. 1791 &endash; 13 July 1855) who married Christian Stucki on Feb. 3, 1807 the Mündleins were the "ancestors of perhaps one-quarter of the members of the Swiss Mennonite community in the Russian province of Volhynia." (Stahly) However, because no sons survived there was no Mündlein name among the Swiss Volhynian Mennonites who migrated to South Dakota and Kansas in 1874.
In 1784 one hundred years before the Swiss Volhynian migration from the Ukraine to Kansas a group of Mennonite families left the Kurpfalz for Galicia. Galicia was what is now part of the Ukraine, but at the time was an Austrian holding. It was not just Mennonite families that immigrated from the Palatinate to Galicia. According to Martin Schrag (p. 25 & 27) the chaotic economic and social conditions were so burdensome to the lower social classes that 3300 German families left the Palatinate for lands in West Galicia that were opened to German farmers by the Austrian monarch, Joseph II when he ascended to power. The Mennonites were only 28 families out of 3300 families -- less than one percent.
The little village built for the Mennonite immigrants was about seventeen miles southwest of Lvov in the current Ukraine. Kaiser Joseph II was breaking up Catholic religious orders and resettling Protestant Germans, Menonnites, Lutherans, and Calvinists in the area.. A new village named Falkenstein (named for a Palitinate duchy). (Schrag, p. 23). was built for the families, including the Mündleins. Important to the Mennonite families settling in Galicia were the promises of exemption from military service and a proclamation of religious tolerance as well as receiving a hereditary lease on 35 acres of land. (Schrag, p.27) The Müdleins remained in Falkenstein until they moved with other Amish families to the villages of Urzulin and Michaelsdorf about thirty miles northeast of Lublin around 1800. Joseph Mündlein died on Easter Day 23(?) April 1810 and Elisabeth on 1 Jan 1817. (In providing the link to the map, I have included in the map area covered portions of present day Poland, Lithuania, Bela Rus and the Ukraine.)
It is understood by the Voran family that the first documented ancestor of this family was a young orphan boy who approached Joseph Mündlein on the streets of Lublin, Poland and asked to go home with him. However, as Stahly points out, Paul Voran (possibly named by Joseph Mündlein because he did not know his name) must have been older than four or five at the time because he married Freni Rupp in 1805 and she was born in 1783.
Joseph Mündlein was apparently a leader of men. There is the report quoted above that he had been a mayor or chief magistrate of a locality in the Kurpfalz. It is recorded that after the Amish families moved to Falkenstein Joseph Mündlein and Peter Krehbiel led the group in Sunday worship. In 1786 he was ordained the elder minister of the Amish Congregation and signed a 1779 statement of church order for the Lemberg congregation. This Amish congregation supported "strict adherence to traditional order and discipline within the Amish congregation." (Stahly) They were also of the "Häftlern group that used hooks instead of buttons on their clothes. (Information on Amish history, belief and practice.)
Joseph Mündlein also was forthright enough in his care of his congregation to go the governor of Galicia to "prove his faith with the Gospel, and thereupon received written privileges." (Kanagy) After the move of the Galician Amish families to Urzulin and Michaelsdorf in the southwest corner of Lithuania, Joseph Mündlein shared the oversight of the families in the villages with Christian Graber and Christian Stucki (his son-in-law?)
Sometime after 1795, then, and before 1800 Paul Voran joined the Amish household of Joseph Mündheim. Family tradition says that he was a servant boy and married Freni Rupp, also a servant in the Mündlein household. Thus Paul Voran, regardless of his earlier life, spent the rest of his life in the strict faith and practice of his Amish guardian. Though the Vorans did not adhere to the strict Amish practice by the time they left Kotsufova in the Ukraine for the migration to Kansas, many of this family have retained the faith and tradition of their fathers.
