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The Mennonite Quarterly Review

The first Indiana Amish Directory⁵was published in 1970, the
initiative for this first community census coming from geneticist Harold
Cross. Along with other colleagues (most notably Victor McKusick) at
the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Cross worked with
Amish collaborators to produce nearly complete census data on
settlements in Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. These researchers
primarily wished to trace genetic anomalies in particular Amish

families and regions of the country,⁶and to do so they needed clear
census information.

Although the 1970 Indiana Amish Directorywas compiled with the
aid of computers at Johns Hopkins University, successive directories
have been done entirely by Old Order Amish families. The Amish
have been convinced that community directories are useful tools for,
among other purposes, locating homes in an unfamiliar district where
church services will be held or keeping track of birth dates of friends
and relatives.

The directories contain information on individual church districts
and families within those districts. Specific pieces of data include: the
name of each family member, names of each spouse's parents, numbers of
children, birth and death dates, dates of marriage, church affiliations
of children, and occupations of household heads. The 1980 Directory
includes information on 10,901 individuals; the 1988 on 14,341.
Unfortunately social scientists have almost entirely overlooked this

rich source of data.⁷

Changes inRate of DefectionSince 1920

The Elkhart-LaGrange settlement has experienced a rather
dramatic population increase in recent decades. In 24 years, from 1964
to 1988, the population of the settlement grew from 5000 to more than

5_{. Harold E. Cross and Eli E. Gingerich, comps.,Indiana Amish Directory(Baltimore:}
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970).

66. For an overview of this research see Victor A. McKusick, _{Medical Genetic Studies of the Amish}
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).

7_{. A few other studies have used the directories' data; see, for example, Thomas W.}
Foster, "Occupational Differentiation and Change in an Ohio Amish Settlement,"Ohio
Journal of Science, 84 (1984), 74-81. Some families have been reluctant to participate in the
data collection for these directories. In 1980 eighty-seven families refused to provide
information, and in 1988 fifty-six families were not included.