PREFACE

For more than 130 years, immigrants of "German origin" from many different countries and other Canadian provinces have played a major cultural, economic and religious role in Alberta. The settlement histories of certain clearly defined groups, such as the various Mennonite groupings and the Hutterites, have been documented and narrated in many scholarly and general-interest publications, initiated and assisted by their groups' organizations dedicated to the examination and documentation of their developmental history. As well, several groups of "Germans" from well-defined geographical origins in Central and Eastern Europe, such as the generalized "Germans from Russia", have also succeeded in documenting their history in Alberta; others like the Volhynians have also documented their arrival. To this day, these groups hold annual international, national and regional conventions and meetings, organize regional and local chapters, and publish newsletters documenting their current activities and bringing together historical documents.

Among these organizations are the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia (AHSGR), the Germans from Russia Heritage Center, the Society for German Genealogy in Eastern Europe (SGGEE), the Historical Society of Germans from Poland and Volhynia, the Federation of East European Family History Societies (FEEFHS), the North Dakota Libraries with the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, the GRHS Bessarabian Regional Interest Group, and others, such as Glueckstal Colonies Research Association, the Bukovina Society of the Americas and the Galizien German Descendants.

As the dominant religious and cultural force among early Albertan immigrants of German origin, the Lutherans have been able to present countless detailed accounts as well as overviews in church histories and histories of the work of the several Lutheran synods in Alberta. The German Baptists have also recorded the history of early immigration to Alberta in numerous publications.

But what about documenting the cultural history of "the others", those whose ancestry does not belong to one of these groups? What about those who came in the interwar-years, the re-settlers from the U.S. of many origins, the immigrants from central and eastern Europe to Alberta after World War II, the recent immigrants from German-speaking countries? Little has been published about them, their immigration history to Alberta and their achievements. The huge influx of imigrants from post-war Germany and the "Volksdeutsche" from the 1950s on to Alberta has attracted little attention.

In the mid-1990s the German-Canadian Association of Alberta - the umbrella organization for more than 30 German clubs and other groups in the province - decided to compile and support the compilation of source materials for a history of the "German-Albertans", but their resolve evaporated after just a few years. At present, their leadership as well as their membership show little interest in documenting the history of the German-Albertans.

Are the members of the second and third generations of German immigrants in Alberta aware of - and interested in - their ancestors' history, their struggles and successes? Do they care, and why should they care? It is certainly true that some members of the second and third generations are keenly interested, but most are not.

The present project aims to identify and bring together source materials on all these groups so that one of these days a comprehensive history of the settlement of "the Germans in Alberta" can be written with comparative ease because all publicly available historical sources will have been identified.

This compiler has published several volumes attempting the documentation of the cultural history of "the Germans" in Alberta, but so much more needs to be done. As detailed below, this bibliography of the cultural history of the "German-Albertans" since the 1880s attempts to bring together in succinct form literally thousands of sources published over the last 130 years from which such a comprehensive history might be written.

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