In the last note, I claimed that the people at the German Lutheran Church in the Robinson River Valley, during the period from 1750 to 1800, acted in a narrow range of ways that permits us to deduce some relationships among the people. The ways in which they acted were not unusual; in fact, they are probably the way in which many of us would act today.
There is certainly one individual in the community who seems to defy the logic that we have grown to expect. That is Elizabeth, the wife of Matthias Weaver. If one went by the records at the church, one would conclude that she was a Carpenter. We have a will, though, by Mark Finks in which he refers to his daughter, Elizabeth Weaver. This leaves us with the question of why she would act so much like a Carpenter.
This has been a topic of conversation between Nancy Dodge and me. We throw "what if" scenarios at each other (on a variety of subjects) without necessarily asking that the other one believe it. One time, Nancy threw out the idea that Mark Finks had been married twice. Such an idea is not extreme. There have probably been several cases of remarriages that we know nothing about.
What I liked about this idea is that it could be the answer to why Elizabeth Finks acted as though she were a Carpenter. Suppose that a first wife of Mark Finks (the Senior) died at child birth but the infant, Elizabeth, lived. Now Mark would have the problem caring for Elizabeth. Suppose that Barbara Carpenter, the wife of John, stepped forward and suggested to Mark that he let her care for the baby Elizabeth. Perhaps Elizabeth was raised by the Carpenters. There was no question of her not being a Finks and she was remembered in her biological father's will but not in John Carpenter's will.
I wanted to mention this because the idea that EVERYONE acts in a well-defined way is not true. There are exceptions. Perhaps these exceptions are just telling us something deeper. On the whole though, the patterns of behavior at the German Lutheran Church are well defined in the last half of the Eighteenth Century. They are worth studying. But one must be prepared for some unusual and very interesting cases.
(16 Jan 04)
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.