Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

o you remember about X?” In the first case, however, oral tradition provided a basic informational frame- work for the life of Aleksandra. Among several dozen photographs, two are particularly significant. The first, from the Omsk period before 1922, is a photo on thick card- board with many creases and cracks, of a size larger than modern A4, and shows a group of people in front of a wooden building during the Siberian winter. Family tradition interprets it as the Baptist congregation in Omsk around 1904, including a five-year-old Aleksandra and her parents. The story which accompanies the photo claims that a few years later Aleksan- dra’s father (helped) built the Baptist church in Omsk with his own funds. The second photograph depicts about twenty women sporting a sign which (in Croatian) says: “Zagreb Baptist Church. Women’s Association “Tabitha: 1937”. Aleksandra sits in the front row in the middle. Two other women sitting in the first row are also identified as Russian. These two photographs signify two major geographical and temporal directions of further research. Thus I will present subsequent investigation under these two main headings. However, it must be noted that the actual research could not be compartmentalised, that traces often crossed, and that they forked off into manifold leads, sometimes dozens of them, which I schizophrenically followed at the same time without knowing in advance when and if I would eventually be able to integrate them into a compre- hensible story. The Croatian Baptist Front An attempt to glean from the earliest history of the Baptist church in Zagreb started with a search for minutes of church business meetings from 227 the founding of the church in 1921 to 1939. The minutes were not in the church archive; they were located with an older member of the church and retrieved from him, all with great conspiracy, as he did not want others to know he had them. I suspect that many such invaluable written docu- ments throughout Eastern Europe are not in the archives of a local church or denominational headquarters, but in the possession of individuals who keep them safe at their homes. The minutes, among many other useful pieces of information, supplied the date in 1934 when Aleksandra was received into membership of the Zagreb church, and the year 1914 as the year when she was baptised in Omsk. It also recorded that Aleksandra prayed twice at business meetings in 1937 and 1938. Almost a year and a half after I started my research, the newly appointed secretary of the Zagreb church discovered quite accidentally the subse- quent book of minutes covering the period from 1939 to 1960. As a result of personal acquaintance, the key to much inductive historical research in Central and Eastern Europe, I made a complete copy of the whole book of these minutes, as I had done with the first book. These minutes contain more references to Aleksandra, who in this period i