ROOTS & BRANCHES

Original records are messy.

Original records are often difficult to read.

Original records still sometimes have errors.

But accessing original records makes the difference.

What kind of difference? Just ask Gary Mauchmar, a Michigan descendant of the same Machmer / Machemer / Magemer family of Berks County from which I hail, too.

Mauchmar for years had to rely upon a translation and transcription by the Rev. J.W. Early of the Bern Reformed Church baptismal records from the 1700s in which there were several Machmer records as well as other entries he suspected had been mistranscribed.

One of these was the baptism in 1785 of Rosina Lauer, daughter of Henry Lauer and wife, with sponsors who Early named as “Nicholas Wagner and wife Rosina.”

Mauchmar suspected that “Wagner” was really the Machmer spelling variant “Magemer.” If this was so, it would add evidence to the circumstantial case that Nicholas’ wife Rosina was born a Lauer and possibly a sister of Elisabeth, who was the known wife of Nicholas’ cousin Henry Machmer.

He had asked me to try and track down this original as well as those from several other congregational and private pastoral registers, having been frustrated by the custodians of several record sets who cited the fragility of the originals for denying him access to a photocopy made from them.

Since I have ancestors going back eight generations buried on the Bern Historic Graveyard and am still an associate member of the church, I figured I’d make Bern Reformed’s records a test case.

So, with the assistance of a couple of the church members, I photographed the entire record book that starts in the 1730s and runs through 1835 in a little over a half an hour.

No flash was used and the book, while plenty fragile, was not damaged in the process. Now, both I and the church have digital copies of the record book … ensuring researchers access with no need to disturb the original in the future.

I’m hoping that record custodians will see this as a model of how to create access to historical records – so that historians and genealogists can see exactly what was written in the originals without the filter of a possibly faulty transcription or translation – while not compromising their roles in preserving those originals, leading to a win-win for all concerned.

And what about Nicholas “Wagner?” Well, Mauchmar was right all along … the name really was “Magemer.”

How many other ancestors remain “hidden” behind a wall of transcription or translation errors? For me, this is a “call to action” to try and bring them to the fore.