ROOTS & BRANCHES

Retired professor John V. Richardson Jr. contacted me a couple of years ago about a notation in Pennsylvania German church baptismal entry that had made it difficult for him to get a supplemental application to Sons of the American Revolution accepted.

I think Richardson is much like myself, interested in joining lineage societies for the “thrill of the proof”—because even though some of them had elitist origins and used “social register” bona fides rather than thoroughly documented pedigrees, most if not all of these organizations now pride themselves on putting people through the paces, genealogically speaking.

The baptism in question was of a Johann Adam, son of Philip Jacob Berre and wife, recorded in the register of the Zion’s or Lehigh Union Church in what’s now Lower Macungie Township, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania.

Richardson originally had worked from an abstract of the Zion’s records prepared by the late Raymond E. Hollenbach, who I described to Richardson as a “sharp self-taught genealogist.”

In the Zion’s register, however, Hollenbach added the notation “a child raised by them” by the parents’ names, casting doubt on whether Philip Jacob and his wife were natural or adoptive parents (It’s also significant that Hollenbach’s abstract converts what were originally entries in a narrative format into columns—easier to read, for sure, but a departure from source that no translator / transcriber following modern standards would do).

Richardson also consulted the late John T. Humphrey’s Pennsylvania Births: Lehigh County, 1734–1800 but did not find the baptism listed at all in that book’s alphabetized entries. The originals were reported not to be in the possession of the church but Richardson hired a

professional researcher to ferret out a microfilm copy at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

The original on microfilm showed that Hollenbach’s notation of “a child raised by them” came from the phrase “ein erzeugtes Kind,” which Katherine Schober, the translator who owns Germanology Unlocked, says simply means “a begotten child,” and has nothing to do with anything but a natural birth.

So, the moral of the story is one that “Roots & Branches” has reported upon often: Whenever it’s at all possible, don’t settle for an abstract or an easy-to-read compilation if there’s anyway to access a copy of the original! Richardson reported back recently that his application was accepted and that while his exposition on the baptism didn’t cause problems, he did need to go to great lengths to document his ancestor’s later residence in present-day York and Adams counties, Pennsylvania.

The acceptance was bittersweet for Richardson, however; he had tried to use this line for his 95-year-old mother’s Daughters of the American Revolution application and it had been rejected at the time of her death in 2019.