The Hebron Church Register is not quite what it would appear to be on a first glance; however, when it is understood, it is an extremely valuable tool. Several problems have been enumerated and the present note seeks to explain how the problems arose and what they mean. The first clue in solving the mysteries is to note that the character of the Register changed late in the fall of 1775 when Rev. Franck came to Hebron. At this time, the presentation changed from a family orientation to a chronological recording. His preference must have been for chronological recording.
Assume now that the trustees of the church wanted to give Rev. Franck the best possible view of the members of the church and their families. They decided to reorganize the data into pages of family information. Using notes, they resorted the information they had, using basically one page per family. Though they made some attempt to put the families in the order of the first child of each family, this was not important. This explains why the pages were not used in the sequence of the first child's birth.
In the sorting process, they occasionally temporarily overlooked a child who was then listed out of sequence. Thus, children are out of sequence.
There was a lot of writing to do, so they saved some on this by omitting the baptismal date. Rev. Franck could assume that every child was baptized; the actual date was not that significant. The date of birth was important to understanding the family and to knowing when to expect the child would be ready for confirmation classes.
In some cases two families could be put on one page. For example, the George Miller family is on the top of page 4 and the John Carpenter's family is below that. When the Register was rewritten in 1775, they had good reasons to believe there would be no more children in the Miller family (it was now 21 years past the first child). There were only three Miller children and paper was expensive.
Saying that a woman in 1759 was Barbara Chelf was permissible because people were being described in terms of their names in 1775. In fact, one should conclude that the situation in the local church in 1775 is being described, not past history. From this one could conclude that families who had moved away were not included. Why describe someone who was no longer present?
It appears that one rule they adopted was that no family who had children born earlier than 1750 would be included. All of the families who are included appear to us to be complete; older children are not missing. This rule may have come about because the data from which the rewritten register was made was no older than 1750. A family was included only if the record was complete.
The family of Zachariah Blankenbaker presented a problem. Zach married a widow who had two daughters before 1750 by her first marriage. But Zach and Els had only children after 1750. As the rewriting of the Register was taking place, Zach's family was omitted at first because of the step-children born before 1750. Finally, near the end of the rewrite, they decided that since the first child of Zach and Els was born in 1750 the family would be included. So the family is listed on page 22 even though the first child's birth would indicate that one of the first pages would be appropriate.
The assumption that the Register was rewritten in 1775 can explain all of the problems. It is necessary to come to the conclusion that the Register was actually rewritten then. No other explanation serves nearly as well.
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.