‘Born Amish’: Writing memoir helped author understand family’s excommunication

Ann Stoltzfus Taylor spent much of her childhood growing up Amish on a farm near Intercourse.

All of her relatives were Amish, her friends were Amish and she spent many of her days in an Amish schoolhouse.

It was the life she knew.

But her world was turned upside down when she was 14 years old and an Amish bishop excommunicated her father and grandfather.

“One day we were Amish and the next day we weren’t,” says Taylor, who lives in Greenfield Estates in East Lampeter Township.

Taylor recounts her father’s excommunication in a memoir, “Born Amish: Life Before the Ex-communication,” which was published earlier this year.

Though the excommunication is the pivotal moment in the book, Taylor spends much of her memoir exploring her childhood and explaining the values she learned growing up in an Amish household.

Taylor, who earned her doctorate in adult education at Temple University and started a counseling practice after a 13-year stint as a Pennsylvania parole officer, says she first began thinking about writing the memoir after her husband’s death in 2011.

She says she had read numerous memoirs and also started attending conferences about how to write one. She thought about her childhood, focusing on the excommunication.

“All of a sudden, I wanted to know what really happened,” Taylor says.

She says her parents didn’t spend a lot of time talking about it.

“My parents didn’t tell me too much, and it all happened so suddenly,” she says. “Suddenly we were out of the (Amish) community. My father and grandfather just took it in stride. They sort of had a sense of humor about it, probably to cover up the humiliation. That was sort of what they did.”

Taylor says she spent about three years conducting research for the book before she started writing.

She discovered that the dispute with the bishop, who was her grandfather’s younger brother, stemmed from his belief that one man’s manufacturing business had grown too large.

The bishop wanted him to sell the business but the business owner’s friends, including her father and grandfather, disagreed at a meeting in 1954.

The meeting ended with the bishop threatening to excommunicate him unless he sold it. His friends, who numbered about a dozen, told the bishop that if he did that, he would have to excommunicate all of them. And that’s exactly what the bishop did.

“It was painful at first, particularly for me, because I was leaving my friends,” Taylor says. “And not just my friends but my friends’ parents, who had known me since I was born, and they liked me. Suddenly I was out in this totally different world, so it was a shock.”

Her life changed dramatically, something that was driven home when a Buick showed up in their driveway.

“The electricity was a big thing,” she says. “I was a reader and I was reading under the comforters with a flashlight, and suddenly there were two lamps, one on either side of my bed. It’s quite a nice transition. There were hair dryers, electric fans, all kinds of things.”

The world of education — most Amish children stop attending school after the eighth grade — opened up to her. She earned a diploma from Eastern Mennonite University before starting her post-graduate studies.

“(My mother) used to tell me, ‘You’re lucky that we left because you wouldn’t be having this education if we hadn’t,’ ” Taylor says.

She says that the bishop did tell the men who were excommunicated that he would allow them to come back if they admitted wrongdoing. Her father and grandfather declined.

Did Taylor ever consider returning to the Amish lifestyle?

“It’s interesting,” she says. “Just recently an Amish man said, ‘Have you ever thought about coming back?’ and I said, ‘Oh no, Daniel, I would miss my clothes and my jewelry.’ He laughed.”

Crédito: JON FERGUSON | Assistant Content Editor Editor