The Hebron Church Register is not quite what it seems to be. It appears to have been started in the year 1750 as the earliest births start in that year. However, the internal evidence shows that the oldest writing in it dates from 1775. One cannot escape the conclusion that it was rewritten in that year and that it did not include all of the births from 1750 to 1775. This is one reason that the number of births in these twenty-five years is low. Not all of the births that had occurred in the community were recorded in the rewritten Register.
In the year 1775, just before the new pastor, Jacob Franck, came, the congregation decided to put their baptismal and birth records into a better and more systematic order that would be a help to Rev. Franck. They collected their data together and sorted it by families. Basically, each family was given one page in the Register on which the parents were listed at the top and their children were listed below them. Some families were not included in the rewrite though. They had moved away and Rev. Franck would not need a knowledge of them. In the rewrite, only those families who were still living in the community were included. So if your family moved away in the period before 1775, it will not be found in the Register.
The rule was made that no family would be included who had children born before 1750. This may have been an arbitrary rule or it may have arisen from the fact they had no records from before 1750. The families that are included do not seem, from other sources, to have had children born before 1750.
When the original records started is not clear. The practice from Germany was to record baptisms, deaths, and marriages as they occurred. Since a Lutheran minister could not legally perform a marriage, it would be reasonable that they did not include these. Whether they ever kept a record of deaths is not clear, but by 1750 they were keeping a complete record of births, baptisms, and the sponsors at baptisms. Probably they were keeping these before 1750 but they did not use the data in the rewrite.
The 1750 rule lead to a quandary as what to do about the family of Zacharias (John Nicholas) Blankenbaker. Zacharias had his first child in 1750 so he should have been included in the very first pages since a rough chronological sequence was maintained in the rewrite. But his family is entered on page 22, far out of the sequence in which it would be expected. At first, during the rewrite, his family was omitted because Zacharias had married a lady who had two daughters, both born before 1750. Then it was observed that none of Zacharias' own children was born before 1750 so, in the end, they included him. But, no mention is made of his stepdaughters.
One of the tipoffs that the Register was not quite what it appeared to be was that some of the children in a family were not in the proper sequence. And the pages were not assigned to the families in the proper sequence. It was just noted that the family of Zacharias should have been one of the very first pages but it was entered on page 22 instead.
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.