When did our ancestors celebrate New Years? Of course, this assumes they did mark the day as something special.
In Germany, the calendar had switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar which resulted in New Years moving from March 25 to January 1. So before our Germans left their homes, they were observing the start of the new year on January 1. It must have seemed very strange to them in Virginia to find that the new year started on March 25. They perhaps muttered about the strange ways of the English.
Did the Germans adopt the use of the Julian calendar where the new year starts on March 25? For their own purposes, they probably did not. They continued to speak German among themselves, and they probably continued to use the Gregorian calendar, that is, the revised calendar. We have some evidence for this. When the Evangelical Lutheran Church on the Robinson River set up their financial books preparatory to a fund raising drive, they choose to set the start of the accounting period as January 1. To us, this appears natural. But at the time it was done, this was just another day in the year in Virginia.
It shows how the Germans clung to their culture and set up a miniature Germanic society amongst the English.
I have no knowledge that New Years was anything special among the Germans.
Some of the dates recorded for births and baptisms at the Hebron Lutheran Church are in the period before the English adopted the Gregorian calendar. It is not clear to me how these dates were recorded, i.e., by which calendar. John Blankenbaker
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.