In the German Lutheran Church in the Robinson River Valley, the next most important class of information after the baptisms are the Communion Lists. Not every church maintained Communion Lists, but from 1775 to 1812, this church kept lists of the people who partook of communion. Since these are simply lists of names, it might be wondered what information they might have.
I began to suspect that the information in the Lists for this church had not been mined when I read some of the Lists transcribed by George Smith and published by Klaus Wust. When I looked at the names (of couples) for the first nine entries on Easter 1776, I was able to see that these people were related. In eight of the couples, at least one of the two was descended from the same woman. In one couple, both were descended from this woman which counterbalanced the one couple who were "outsiders". This led me to consider the Lists with more respect. It also led to frustrations of not having all of the Lists and of not having an index to the names.
The solution was to find all of the Lists that I could, to transcribe them, and to publish them so that others would not have the same problems. I was assisted in this endeavor by Nancy Dodge and by Andreas Mielke. This was not an easy project. I took my microfilm, had it converted to a CD and went to work. I printed some of the Lists so we could examine them in more detail. When the doubtful cases had been isolated, Andreas and I went to the church where Rev. Larsen had brought the originals from their secure storage. We looked at the doubtful cases and made the best decisions that were humanly possible. We had access to other Lists with which we could compare our results. The final result was printed in a fifty-two page booklet complete with an index.
After the work was done, I used the information to find the wife of Peter Fleshman, who came as a young boy in 1717. Actually, I had started by trying to confirm whether Peter Fleshman was the husband of Barbara Tanner, but the evidence for this was nil. Instead, the evidence showed that Peter had married Maria Sophia Weaver. What form did the evidence take? It showed a high percentage of association between the descendants of Fleshmans and Weavers. The actual details, involving several pages of analysis, were given in Beyond Germanna (see page 767). The Communion Lists were also valuable in establishing that Susanna Clore Weaver Crigler Yeager had two Crigler daughters, namely, Elizabeth, who married Michael Yager, and Susanna, who married Michael Utz.
The hidden factor in these Lists is that the Lutheran Church uses a prescribed method for administering communion. The order of the names in the Lists is the order of seating. So, the Lists show who was sitting next to whom.
[The notes will be stopped for about a week while we travel from Albuquerque to Chadds Ford.]
(04 Dec 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.