John Blankenbaker's Germanna History Notes
Note 2276
I am amazed, or perhaps amused, with people who consider a marriage license or a marriage record as proof of motherhood. Their typical question is, "Is there a marriage license? Do you have proof of the marriage?" They consider this as black and white evidence that is solid.
Consider Johann Friedrich Mueller who married Anna Maria Arnd in Freudenberg (a documented fact in the church records). They came in 1738 on the ship
Oliver
. John Frederick Miller’s will, he being the same man, named his wife Mary. So we have a case that the marriage record says Anna Maria and the will says Mary. Of course, Mary is the Anglicized version of Maria. And we know that the Germans often used the second given name as their calling name. So was Anna Maria Arnd the mother of John Frederick’s children? Perhaps she was, but the marriage license and the will do not prove the case.
The case just cited is fairly clear. There seems to be a paper trail of documentation and most people would put Anna Maria Arnd on their charts without any hesitation. Are they making a mistake? Of the passengers on the ship
Oliver
, about two out of three died on the trip. Mary is a rather common name. Maybe Anna Maria Arnd died on the voyage and John Frederick married again. The odds that Anna Maria Arnd is the mother of the children is only about two out of three or something in this range. And this is for a case where the paper documentation seems to be good.
If you have a similar situation, do you put it down as a certainty or do you indicate there a probability that is well below the certainty?
Now consider the case of the parents, in the German Lutheran Church in the Robinson River Valley, who bring a child for baptism. In at least one case the male adult is not the father, the father having died before the child was born. But in the general case, ignoring these rare exceptions, the sponsors tell us a lot about the maiden name of the mother.
For example, Michael Schwindel and his wife Elisabetha brought Hanna for baptism (in 1776). The sponsors were Georg Utz, Jun., Rebecca Freh, and Margaret Breil. George Utz, Jun., had a sister Elizabeth. Elizabeth had a sister Margaret, who married John Broyles. That Michael had a sister Rebecca completes the pattern of naming siblings as sponsors. There is no question in my mind that Elizabeth Schwindel’s maiden name was Utz.
To me this is better evidence than is given by a marriage license or other legal documentation. Yet my conclusion is based on implied evidence and not on an explicit statement. Some people have difficulty accepting that implied evidence may be better than explicit evidence.
(24 Mar 06)