Our annual general meeting this year will feature Rod Martin, webmaster of the Ezra Eby genealogical database.

Rod A. Martin is a retired psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario, who lives in London, Ontario. Both of his parents were born into horse-and-buggy Mennonite families in the farming country around St. Jacobs in Waterloo County. Although Rod was not raised Mennonite, he grew up with a strong sense of connection to his Menno roots and relatives. Two years ago he became the webmaster of the Ezra Eby genealogical website. This is a database of nearly 300,000 individuals, most of them descendants of the original Swiss Mennonite and Amish settlers in Waterloo County and other areas of Ontario. 

Since becoming webmaster, Rod has been exploring this database in some depth. He takes a sort of “data mining” approach, writing his own computer programs to dig below the surface and sift through the data, looking for patterns and relationships at the population level that couldn’t be found by simply searching through one person or family at a time.

In this talk, Rod will introduce the Ezra Eby website and will discuss some interesting discoveries from his investigations of the database, focusing particularly on the high level of interconnected family relationships among the Swiss Mennonite population in Ontario. 

Location: Community Education Room, Conrad Grebel University College. The Community Education room is just inside the main doors of the Grebel Academic Building, off the large parking lot. Parking is free on Saturdays.

Schedule: 

1. Mennonite Historical Society of Ontario annual general meeting, 2:00-2:30. Come here what we have been up to in the last year, and some exciting new plans. While only members can vote, the meeting is open to the public.
2. Talk by Rod Martin, 2:30-3:30

A screenshot from Rod Martin's blog illustrating the Ezra Eby database relationship calculator: