ROOTS & BRANCHES

My first memory of a religious group called the Moravians is more than a little idiosyncratic.

I was helping to plan a road rally in which much of the fun was coming up with challenging clues to mark turnoffs.

I came up with “Right at the Central European religious group” for a turn at what is now North Heidelberg United Church of Christ in Berks County, Pennsylvania, playing off the underline of a signboard stating “Founded by the Moravians, 1742.”

I didn’t know then that “Moravians was a nickname for the denomination’s formal name of Unitas Fratrum (Latin for “Unity of Brethren”).

Or that by the time Moravians came to America, they were based in the German state of their patron Count Ludwig von Zinzendorf.

Or that the denominations was attempting to “unify” other Protestant sects and had tried to take over the church (Bern Reformed United Church of Christ) at which some three dozen of my ancestors worshiped and were buried over eight generations.

Or that two ancestors of mine found in the early records of Bern Church did defect to help found the North Heidelberg congregation.

After I did determine these many facts, what I learned made me realize that I had way mischaracterized and underestimated the Moravians.

Part of the Moravian missionary ethic was education—and recordkeeping … which probably signals why I say I’m happy to have Moravian ancestors. Part of that recordkeeping includes family registers of immigrants giving data about their European origins, and many Moravians wrote memoirs that revealed more insights about common people than is usual for the time.

The denomination today has an excellent archives system and I recently had the opportunity to take a series of workshops from Thomas J. McCullough, the assistant archivist at the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which is the official repository for the records of the Moravian Church in America – Northern Province.

McCullough described the many types of records kept by the congregations of the denomination as well as projects that are making these documents more accessible to researchers:

• There’s the “Moravian Roots Genealogy Database” that includes a growing database of abstracts from church records in its collections. Basic searches are free while viewing transcripts of the full records requires a login and purchase of credits for a nominal price.
• The archives website’s “Research Our Holdings” tab offers several online catalogs that allow researchers to look for holdings in advance of an in-person visit.
• There’s also an in-process project called “Moravian Lives” that looks to leverage the memoirs (called Lebenslaufe, which means “walk of life” in German) written my or on behalf of many Moravians.

The archives also holds an annual German Script Class that works intensively to teach researchers the cursive handwriting used in centuries of German-language records.

For more information on the archives, go to its website at https://www.moravianchurcharchives.org.