The previous notes are heavily, almost totally, indebted to John Humphreys, who, as I am, is interested in what can be done with the information in Baptismal Registers. John, besides writing the book, " Understanding and Using Baptismal Records ", has compiled several books of early Pennsylvania Baptismal Records from all faiths. I have not finished reporting on the material in John's " Understandin g" book. For this note, I am going to comment on the Baptismal Records in the Hebron Lutheran Church in Madison, Virginia.
Here, the key is understanding that whenever it was possible, the sponsors, three or four in number, were relatives by blood or marriage of the parents. As we have seen in the previous discussions, this was not always the case. In the Catholic Church, for a period of time, it was actually forbidden. Also, the Catholic Church went from three sponsors to one sponsor, or perhaps two sponsors. This shows that there was no general rule which applied to all faiths, or, even, probably, to all churches within one faith. So the discussion which we have been going through shows the range of possibilities, and even some of the reasons behind the differences.
Each church should be studied as an individual case, for not all churches in a given faith were the same. Even within a given church, the rules could change with time. They changed with the Hebron Lutheran Church as the pastors changed. When Rev. Carpenter became the pastor of the church, he tended to allow parents as sponsors [I have never forgiven him] which violated several of the rules which had been in effect. The rules in effect from 1750 to about 1790 were fairly consistent. From a study of the sponsors, I had formulated the idea that the three or four sponsors would be of the same age and related to the parents. When I asked, in the year 2000, the pastor of the Lutheran Church in Dietenhofen, Germany, if they had "rules" in choosing the sponsors, he quoted to me the exact rules which I had formulated for the German Lutheran Church in the Robinson River Valley in the last half of the Eighteenth Century.
But what rules would be used in the Hawksbill Church in the Shenandoah Valley? I have no idea.
I first observed, when reading the baptisms in the Hebron Church about fifteen years ago, that a large percentage of the sponsors seemed to be related to the parents, since often the sponsors had the same surname as the father. Then as I learned the maiden names of the mothers, I could see that many of the sponsors were related to the mother also. Thus, was born my desire, still not completed, to state the relationship of every sponsor to the parents. This has involved a study of the community and there are families about whom I have never learned the basic elements. So the task of identifying the sponsors will probably never be completed.
Incidentally, as I studied the sponsors, one family was noteworthy because so few of them were present at either the baptisms or communions. This probably meant that they were not Lutherans, but their absence does not mean they can be assigned to a specific religion.
(14 Jul 03)
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.