Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

ls are capable of self-organisation; they are dedicated; and they can trust one another - essential components for maintaining complex minis- tries. Whether they will be able to sustain their efforts over the years is a question for the future. 222 Vladimir Parfenenko called the social service work of First Baptist Church in Odessa “invisible”, a curious word to choose for activity that sends church members into the world to serve. To me they seem as visible as a city on a hill (Matthew 5:14). On the other hand, perhaps social service ministries have, in fact, become invisible in post-Soviet Ukraine in the sense that they are no longer concentrated within the walls of a church building, but diffused throughout society like salt and light (Matthew 5:13- 14). But whether visible or invisible, their calling is the same - that people may praise our Father in heaven (Matthew 5:16). Mary Raber is a research student at the International Baptist Theological Seminary, Prague. She has been a voluntary service worker with Mennonite Central Committee since 1981 and is currently based in Ukraine. 223 How I Researched my Grandmother and what I Found: Challenges and Avenues in Researching Baptist History in Eastern Europe Davorin Peterlin introduction, Background, Rationale, Aims and Other Appropriate Preliminary Considerations y grandmother, Aleksandra Cernozubova [Russian Chernozubova], died in 1961. Her husband Nikola Filipovic, my grandfather, had died five years earlier. I was only two when Grandmother died and do not remember her at all. Occasionally I would have a flash of alleged recollec- tion of her, but have long ago realised that all these were just creative exten- sions of the only five photographs which captured the both of us, and have thus discarded this precarious line of historical insight. A renewed interest in family roots overwhelmed me several years ago. Rummaging through the untidy pile of haphazardly stored information about Grandmother produced a brief outline of her life. It is worth pointing out that this outline was built up from incidental information which I had collected from my mother and my aunt, two of Aleksandra’s three children, one in her seventies and the other in her eighties. This source I will hence- forth refer to as family tradition. According to family tradition, Aleksandra was born in Omsk, Siberia, at the turn of the century. Her father, whose name I did not knowat that point, was a rich capitalist who owned a mill. During World War I he employed 224 Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war from a camp near Omsk, and one of them was a young Croatian named Nikola. Nikola and Aleksandra got married in a Baptist church which Aleksandra’s father had helped build and of which both Aleksandra and her father were members. The couple returned to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (SHS), which was renamed Yugoslavia in the late 1920s. When the Commun