I looked for any suggestion that the sponsors at the baptism of a Catholic infant should have any special relationship to the infant. I found none, either because there were no restrictions, or because my search was incomplete. There are, I believe, some restrictions on the future relationship of the sponsor and the infant. For example, I believe it is forbidden for sponsors to marry the child that they sponsor.
The Catholic position was called the base position . The first Church of substance to leave the Catholic fold was the Lutheran Church, and their views are called once removed . (Actually there were early Moravians and I apologize to them for slighting them.) Another Church in the group of first removed is the Church of England, or the Anglican Church, which was present in Colonial America, and is now present under the name of Protestant Episcopal Church. The first removed include these Churches, not because of the time of their formation, but because of the similarity of their views. The Methodist Church, as an outgrowth of their descendancy from the Church of England, could be placed here also.
Martin Luther placed a different interpretation on baptism, but we will simply note that this simplified the ceremony. He did retain the role of sponsors, and he felt it was the responsibility of the parents to select sponsors who were decent, moral, earnest, and sober. The Catholics had a concept of spiritual kinship between the sponsor and the child, and they prohibited mixing spiritual and natural kinship. (I have answered the question of the first paragraph.) Luther rejected this restriction. For Lutherans, the prohibition restricting family members from sponsoring infants was lifted. This permitted relatives to be sponsors, and the Lutherans made very extensive use of this change. In fact, at the German Lutheran Church in the Robinson River, in the eighteenth century, the sponsors were nearly always relatives, or their spouses, a fact of great importance to us as genealogists.
Martin Luther retained emergency baptisms, but he eliminated conditional or corrective baptisms. Thus, in the Lutheran Church, there should be no records of a " ceremony only " or a " corrective baptism ", and, therefore, the emergency baptism may not be recorded. Luther retained the view that baptism was the ticket to heaven, and it also conveyed the right to partake of the Lord's Supper. To Luther, confirmation was not a sacrament , but it was retained as an instructional device , and it was this instruction that was the important thing. (At the German Lutheran Church in the Robinson River, one did not partake of the Communion until after confirmation.)
Though there were variations, the information recorded at a baptism could include the infant's name, its birthday, the baptismal date, the parents, perhaps where they lived, and the names of the sponsors, of which three or four were usual.
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.