In the last note, I gave the family of Rev. George Samuel Klug about as well as anyone knows it. Rev. Klug was the pastor, for about twenty-five years, at the German Lutheran Church in the Robinson River Valley of Virginia. During that time, he married and sired nine children. None of the children appear in the baptismal register. In fact, none of the members of the family hardly appear in the church registers. The oddity of this strikes some people as unusual. Let's look at the reasons for some of the omissions.
Though the baptismal register appears to start in the year 1750, the book in which the baptisms were recorded was not used until 1775. In that year (1775), about 25 years of prior records were entered into the book. Actually, there were omissions. Some families were not entered for one of two reasons. To understand these reasons, we need to look at why the entries were made at all.
A new pastor was coming, and the elders decided it would be good to have the (baptismal) information organized by families, to acquaint the new man with the congregation. Essentially, one page was devoted to one family, and a list of the children, with their birth dates, was entered. The sponsors or godparents were also given. This data had to be taken from some other records, as the accuracy of it precludes that the parents were asked when their children were baptized.
Any family that had moved out of the community was not entered, since the information appeared to have no value. In entering the families, no family was given who had children born before 1750. The exact reason for this rule is not clearly understood. It may have been that they had no data before 1750, or it may have been that they arbitrarily decided this would be the cutoff point.
Whatever the rule was, the Klug family was not included because they had some children born before 1750.
In another book, starting in 1775, communion lists were kept. These were records of the people who were partaking of communion. It would appear that some members of the Klug family would have been taking communion during the time of the lists, but none of them appear (as Klug). This does seem to me to be strange, and I have no explanation.
An Eleanor Klug was a baptismal sponsor in 1782. I do not know if this is a daughter, or a daughter-in-law. The only other mention of a Klug is for Ephraim Klug, who was sworn by a mother to be the father of her natural child, Sara. The mother is identified only as "Rossel". The sponsors at this baptism were Johannes Frey and Maria Rossel.
(13 Mar 02)
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.