To review the past notes briefly, in 1775 the officers of the German Evangelical Lutheran Church (Hebron) decided to take the existing notes on baptisms and reorganize them into families. Thus the new pastor, Rev. Franck, could see the church community at a glance. Apparently they bought a new book for the purpose. In describing the families, the emphasis was on the community in 1775. They even described people at an earlier date by the name they were known by in 1775. Families who had moved away were omitted. So far as is known, the older sheets of information were thrown away.
Were there major errors in the copying process? Actually none are known aside from the case of Barbara Chelf. Apparently they did a good job and the data is to be trusted. There may have been baptisms before 1750 and during the period 1750 to 1775 which were not reported.
When Rev. Franck arrived, he showed his preference for chronological recordings by starting on page 25 by entering the parents' names, the child's name, date of birth and date of baptism and the sponsors. The first of these is 5 Nov 1775 so it is reasonable to say that he arrived just before this time. By the end of the year, he had baptized nine babies. This pace continued throughout his stay. Not only were there more baptisms, the record keeping was better.
Some lay member of the church, perhaps one had been responsible for the preparation of the family section of the Register, did decide to put some of these chronological entries back into the family section. Thus, we have duplicate entries. Where there are approximately duplicate entries, the chronological entry is the one to be trusted. Sometimes in the copying process, the person doing the copying made assumptions. In one case, a sponsor was listed only by name. In the copying process, she was made to be the wife of someone which the original entry did not claim.
Entries appear quite regularly up to October of 1778. This probably marks the end of Rev. Franck's stay, which would be three years on the job. There is then a period in which the data is very suspect. Probably there was no regular pastor and data was entered on a hit or miss basis. The number of baptisms falls off sharply. The pages become very crowded suggesting that the end of the book was being approached at about 50 pages. Entries were made a space available basis rather than in sequence.
Much of the recording was done by lay members. In fact, it appears that one of the people doing the recording, perhaps on a regular basis, was Samuel (son of Jacob) Blankenbühler. He used page 44 to establish a family record for himself. He did share the page with Joseph Carpenter. In the year 1786, only seven baptisms are recorded. Rev. Franck recorded this many in his first two months.
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.