The Hebron Lutheran Church has respectable written records in the Eighteenth Century. They are not complete but they do contain, either explicitly or implicitly, much information that would be otherwise unavailable to us.
These Baptismal Records appear to start in 1750. No doubt, there were earlier records, perhaps going back to the short time that Rev. Stoever served. Rev. Klug surely kept Baptismal Records from 1739 to 1750, but we have no evidence of this today. The beauty of the records for baptisms from 1750 to 1778 makes the absence of any records earlier than 1750 all the more striking. The extant records have some anomalies in them. It took me a while but eventually it dawned on me that there was a logical explanation. In 1775, the records up to that time were rewritten, probably by Moeller, who was to become the pastor. Since the object was to help him understand the present community better, he omitted the earlier records (if any) and he omitted the information on families who had moved away.
Sponsors are given, usually four for each child. In a remarkable number of the cases, the sponsors have the same name as the father suggesting they might be relatives. When the relationships are worked out for a number of the known families, it is seen that nearly always the sponsors are related to the father or mother as siblings, cousins, or their spouses. Thus, the sponsors are related and broadly of the same age group. This suggests, once the rule is established, that the sponsors might be some clues to the names of several of the mothers who had not been identified.
The rule or regulation that the sponsors were to be related is not a tenet of the Lutheran faith, for in the German Lutheran churches at this same time this was not the case. There, in most of the cases, the sponsors were not related or at least no relationship is known. It should never be assumed that the rule applies in all churches. A large number of cases should be worked out in any one church before it is decided what rules might be in use.
The records are written in the German script and therefore are not readily useable by all. Transcriptions have been published, but they failed to note the implied names. I obtained a copy of the microfilm and made my own transcription with the help of previous work, Andreas Mielke, and Nancy Dodge. In a few cases I consulted the original records at Hebron. Then I worked out the implied names of the wives using a variety of sources including the baptismal records themselves. I published this in a booklet entitled
"Hebron" Baptismal Record
. This is the best work now available on the subject, which can only be improved by filling in some of the blanks (and correcting errors!).
(21 Mar 06)
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.