Klaus Wust has studied the Germans in Virginia extensively and, in fact, he is the author of the award winning, " The Virginia Germans ". He makes the comment, applicable throughout the colonies, that whenever a sufficient number of German-speaking people had settled in an area, congregations began to form without assistance from denominational organizations. As ministers ventured into the country side, they were amazed to find functioning congregations and sometimes simple schools. These had been founded and led by the lay people themselves.
The First Germanna Colony was unique in that the immigrants brought a minister with them; he served the colony for about twenty years. After that time, they were in the position of most frontier settlements and used lay resources. Jacob Holtzclaw, the schoolmaster, was a lay reader at Germantown. Over in the Little Fork, John Young was the reader at the church there. The Second Germanna Colony had the benefit, for a year or two, of Rev. Häger of the First Colony; after that time they were without a pastor for fifteen years. During this period, they built a simple cabin church and John Michael Smith was a reader. Apparently they had a school also, though they had no professional teacher.
This pattern was repeated throughout the areas that the Germans settled. In the Anabaptist areas, the norm was leadership by lay people, who had been elected to serve in this capacity. One of the implications of lay leadership was that no records were kept of their actions. Baptism did not require an ordained minister, as a lay person could baptize. With a few exceptions, no church records exist for Virginia before 1760. Marriages had to be performed by the Church of England and their records are also very scarce.
Peggy S. Joyner has compiled " Extant German Church Records from Virginia and West Virginia: A Checklist ". (This appeared in THE REPORT, A JOURNAL OF GERMAN-AMERICAN HISTORY, Vol. 38 (1982 ). The State Library of Virginia has published a book describing their holdings of microfilms of church records for all of the denominations.
The early German records were written in German which detracts from their usefulness; however, a number of the records have been published in translation. A leader in this activity has been Shenandoah History (P.O. Box 98, Edinburg, VA 22824), which has published about a dozen booklets of church records. Shenandoah History's attention has not been confined to the Shenandoah Valley, though the majority of the churches were located there.
One of the books from Shenandoah History's series is the Hebron Church Register , which has information on the Lutheran Church outside Madison, Virginia. This is the church founded by the Second Colony immigrants and later additions to their community. The present version of this volume contains original dates from 1775, but the period 1750 to 1775 is recreated from other, now nonexisting records. As such, it is the oldest record of German church activity in Virginia.
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.