Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

xt and final section of this introduction. As a general background it must be kept in mind that Aleksandra, after coming to the SHS, never ever returned to Russia or the USSR, although she wanted to. Political and economic circumstances prevented it for her and her relatives. Consequently, she had never ever seen any of her relatives - father, stepmother, brother, numerous stepbrothers and stepsisters or others — since 1922. But significantly, family tradition asserted strongly that Aleksandra corresponded with them all her life. This extended introduction has been necessary to describe the nature and contents of the body of evidence gathered from family tradition, setting the stage for the report and discussion which follow. I intend to briefly outline some paths of the inductive investigative process which ensued and which was originally anchored in family tradition. As I meander down the rivulets, waterfalls and dead ends of this investigation, I want to point that I am not interested here in laying down the full story. This is impos- sible, as I am still on the prowl, and the comprehensive story will be hope- fully told eventually in several cross-referencing articles anyway. What I do want to communicate is more of a reflection — if it succeeds it might be termed a methodological reflection - on the process of conducting this research. One might conclude that some of the lines of my historical inves- tigation were doomed to fail and that I should have known better than to go that way, but I embarked on this quest armed with little specialist knowledge, replaced instead by huge personal motivation and academic experience in another field of study. Precisely this is the perspective I want to keep throughout this paper. Some scholars doing Baptist history in Eastern Europe will be trained historians, but there will be more who have wandered into this land of historical research and sociological imagina- tion from neighbouring fields ranging from theology to linguistics, from economy to law. Thus I hope that the depiction of my meanderings will entertain fellow researchers of a non-expert kind and provide an insight or 226 two which might carry analogical weight. And finally, I will welcome any hints and ideas about any particular line of investigation in which I seem to have hit a brick wall. One of the primary lines-of investigation was the study of family tradi- tion. This three-pronged approach concentrated on objects of material history, oral tradition and photographs. Material objects were few and not particularly helpful except for cultural reasons. Oral tradition proved most useful when provoked by questions of a specific kind and when accompa- nied by material objects which served as convenient pegs and memory- jerkers. My mother and aunt much more easily remembered things from the past when I asked them specific questions than when I asked general and open-ended questions such as “What d