Barbara (Yager) Clore Chelf has an unusual position in the Hebron Baptismal Register. In fact, her appearances there are sufficient evidence that the Baptismal Register was rewritten at one time. How could her appearance there be so important to understanding the Register?
Barbara Yager married Peter Clore, and he died in 1763, as we know from his will and probate. She then married Phillip Chelf. Before 1763, she should be known as a Clore (after her marriage to Peter).
At the baptism on 8 March 1759 of Margaretha, the daughter of Nicolaus Krickler (Crigler) and his wife Margaretha Kaefer, one of the sponsors is given as Barbara Chelf! The choice of Barbara as a sponsor was normal, as she was the wife of Peter Clore, a cousin-in-law of the father.
It would have taken a lot of crystal ball reading to foresee in 1759 that Barbara would, after a few years, be a Chelf. How did the writer know this?
Sometime before October of 1775, the Baptismal Register was rewritten and reorganized. The best candidate for doing the rewriting and reorganization was suggested by Andreas Mielke, who thinks it may have been Heinrich Moeller, who had accepted the post of pastor in 1774, but then reneged on his duties. For a while he was a Catechist at the German Lutheran Church in Culpeper County. In order to understand the community better, he reorganized and rewrote the Baptismal Register, and what we have today is the result of his work.
As he rewrote the Register, he updated the information in the sense that he used the names of people as they were known in 1774 ! Thus, even though Barbara Yager Clore was her name in 1759, he entered her name in the rewritten Register as Barbara Chelf, though that was not her name in 1759.
At the same time, he omitted some information because it was no longer relevant. If a family had moved away, and by this time (1774) several families had left, then he did enter information on their children, as he did not consider it important to understanding the community in the Robinson River Valley. (And besides paper was expensive.)
Even though the original Register is no longer in existence for births before 1775, the extant Register is an extremely valuable document for understanding the community. It has been translated with amendments and is available from me or from the Germanna Foundation. It is the best available source material, even better, on the average, than the original, hard-to-read German hand-written documents.
(17 Nov 05)
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.