Did you know …

that Paul Revere, the founder and keyboardist of the 1960s rock group Paul Revere and the Raiders, was of Molotschna Mennonite heritage? In fact, his full legal name was Paul Revere Dick, and he was born on 7 January 1938 in Harvard, Nebraska, which is not far from Henderson. He passed away last week at age seventy-six (see here).

Those of us of a certain age will remember that Paul Revere and the Raiders were best known for their Number 1 hit from 1971, “Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian)” (video below).

How do we know that Paul Revere Dick really was from Molotschna? Well, the GRANDMA database includes him (number 64191) and reports further that Paul Revere Dick’s grandfather emigrated from Margenau, Molotschna, to the U.S. aboard the S.S. Strassburg, arriving in New York on 2 July 1878. Another name to add to the people-I-never-would-have-connected-to-Molotschna list! (We will return tomorrow to our series of ancestral photographs, as we take another step back.)

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Thanks to my colleague Bille Jean—second cousin to Paul Revere Dick!—for alerting me to his Molotschna heritage.