Biographical Sketch

John H. Voth, son of Heinrich and Sarah Kornelsen Voth, was born in 1879, in Bingham Lake, Minnesota. At fifteen, he was converted and baptized and joined the Bingham Lake MB Church of which his father was elder. Voth began to teach in rural schools when he was seventeen years old and continued teaching for several years. After 1901, he attended the MB German Department School at McPherson, Kansas, and the German Baptist Theological Seminary at Rochester, New York. In 1907, he married Maria Epp. In 1918, Tabor College conferred on him the A.B. degree.

On July 5, 1908, the Voths were ordained at the Carson Church by Elder Heinrich Voth and Elder Abraham Schellenberg and left for their first missionary term of service in India on August 14, 1908. John and Maria Voth rendered valuable and effective services as itinerating missionaries of the MB Mission among the Telugus in the Hyderabad State of India. Voth erected most of the buildings on the Devarakonda Station. He was successful in winning converts, training indigenous workers, and establishing churches. He began the monthly Telugu paper “Suvarthamani,” in 1920, which became the organ of the Andhra MB Church. When the Voths finally left India in 1942 after a period of 34 years’ service, there were seventeen MB churches with a total of more than 3,000 members in the Devarakonda field.

Through Voth’s extensive writing for the Zionsbote and through his aggressive itineraries while on furlough, he created much interest for the cause of foreign missions in the MB Conference. In the summer of 1942 he and Maria returned to America and established their home at Tulsa, Oklahoma. Here he died July 29, 1943. Interment was at Mountain Lake, Minnesota.

Maria Epp Voth, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Peter Epp, was born on January 1, 1881, in Mountain Lake Minnesota. She studied at the Mountain Lake Bible School and Moody Bible Institute. Following her conversion at the age of twenty, she was baptized and received into the fellowship of the Carson (Delft) Mennonite Brethren Church near Mountain Lake on June 23, 1901. After the death of her husband in 1943, she moved to Hillsboro, Kansas, where she lived until her death on September 16, 1968.
Taken from the Mennonite Encyclopedia and obituary of Maria Voth.