In 1775, when the congregation of Hebron Church rewrote their records of births and baptisms, they purchased a fifty-page book in which to make the entries The used the first 24 pages for family records, devoting one page to a family Some pages had two families though, which was a puzzle to me How did they know that they would not be needing all of the space on the page for the first family? This was one of the oddities that tipped me off that the Register was not quite what it seemed to be Another thing that was strange about the record of baptisms was that the date of baptism was not given though the date of birth was given Remember the book was meant to be a record of baptisms.
When the Rev. Franck arrived in 1775, he found the Register in a beautiful condition with the data neatly organized in sections (a page or part of a page) for each family What did he do? He kept the records in a strict chronological sequence Starting on page 25, he entered each baptism immediately after the previous one giving the parents, the child, the sponsors, and the dates So there is an abrupt change in style, starting with the baptism of Aaron Broyles, son of Peter Broyles and his wife Elizabeth Sponsors were Zacharias Broyles, John Blankenbaker, and Mary Blankenbaker.
Many of the records were copied from the chronological section back into the family section The baptism just cited was one that was copied back into the Peter Broyles family section In the process, the date of baptism was omitted and the sponsors become Zacharias Broyles, John Blankenbaker, and his wife Mary Notice that the Mary Blankenbaker, whom I believe was the sister of John Blankenbaker, became the wife of John Blankenbaker in the copying process In general, for these duplicated records, the one in the chronological section is to be trusted more than the one in the family section.
By October of 1778 when Rev. Franck resigned, the entries were being made on page 36, showing that he had a very busy three years (the previous 25 years had been summarized in 24 pages) The last entry on page 36 is 19 Oct 1778 The first entry on page 37 is for Elizabeth Wayland, who was born on 24 May 1779 The third baptism on this page appears to be in 1781 The following entries skip around in the dates and often omit the year One sees that record keeping became very erratic in the years following the departure of Rev. Franck The number of baptisms falls off sharply and the data is organized poorly At the same time, the fifty-page book was being exhausted The last four pages of this book had been reserved for special events such as the baptisms of children born to unwed mothers and the baptisms of slave children.
In 1787, when William Carpenter, Jr. started his pastorate, another book was purchased Records in this second book were kept by family, not chronologically In the process, some records from before 1787 were entered in this book to make the record more complete In this second book, the first family is Samuel Carpenter and his wife Diana and their children, who start in 1780 Rev. Carpenter was giving his brother's family here.
At a later time, book one and book two were bound together in one volume In this binding process, some of the pages were reordered The page with the handwritten page number of 1 became page 3 and the original page 3 became page 1 in the new rebound book Probably this was because the original page 1 had become so worn that it was deemed safer to interchange the first two sheets of paper.
Besides volume one, there is also a volume two which contains records of communicants, confirmations, minutes of meetings, financial records, the constitution, and general information.
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.