In 1767, a Conrad Fink lived in Windsor, Berks Co., PA. He appeared in the Catholic Church of Goshenhoppen, PA, in 1768. He was in Heidelberg Township, York Co., in 1783, and he died 24 Nov 1794, in Littlestown, Adams Co., which, prior to 1800, was York Co. This information came to me from David Schubert. Certainly the mention of the Catholic Church sparked my interest. An almost equally interesting point was the name of the children in Conrad Fink's family.
These children were Henry, JOHN, ELIZABETH, Margaret, CATHERINE, Mary CHRISTINA, Conrad ANDREW, and Magdalena. The children of Mark Finks, Sr., in Culpeper Co., VA, are CATHERINE, ELIZABETH, Mark, JOHN, Mary, ANDREW, Hannah, and James. I thought this was a significant overlap between the two sets of names. If the two families were related, the age difference between Conrad Fink and Mark Finks, Sr., suggests that Conrad might be of the generation below Mark Finks. (I do not regard the inclusion or omission of the final "s" as significant.)
According to this thesis, the Finks family might have been among the early emigrants from Germany who had lived for a while in England. While they were there, Mark was born. Then they came to Pennsylvania and lived there for a while. Mark, and probably a brother, moved down to Virginia.
In the last note I was telling of my conviction that Catherine Finks Crigler did not attend, except for the last one, any of the baptisms of her children. I cited the omission of her name at the baptisms. There is another reason which strongly enforces this conclusion. For the first ones, the father, Christopher Crigler, did not have his brother as a sponsor for the children. Normally this is a role performed by brothers, sisters (none in this case), and brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law. With only one brother and no sisters, one would have certainly have expected Nicholas to have been selected. Nicholas did appear as a sponsor once, for Wilhelm, the last child. For this baptism, the mother Catherine is listed as present, and in this case Nicholas is a sponsor. I can hear Nicholas saying, "If my brother's wife is not coming to the baptism, I will not be a sponsor." He would have no part of this strange proceeding.
Wilhelm is entered twice in the list of baptisms, once as Wilhelm in the original recording, and as William in the later recording. Wilhelm was born in 1778 and about this time the attitude of the Finks family changed toward the Lutheran Church. They started to participate and they brought children for baptism and they acted as sponsors. Something happened about this time and it may have had a deeper significance than the appearance of Rev. Frank who was very successful at getting people into the church.
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.