ROOTS & BRANCHES

If you’re a regular reader of “Roots & Branches,” you’ll likely remember my reverence for the late Corinne Earnest, who was a leading authority on the illuminated certificates, usually of baptism, known as fraktur.

She also frequently hounded auctions in search of family Bibles with registers and copied the information that often was found nowhere else.

Earnest was my leading contributor when I edited Der Kurier, the quarterly of the Mid-Atlantic Germanic Society, and one of the more shining moments of that collaboration was when she submitted an article with a family register from a Bible published in 1720 in Basel, Switzerland, and first owned by the Valentine Unruh family (including baptisms of his daughters in 1843 and 1750) before being passed on to his daughter Anna Catharina and her husband Johann Jacob Kintzer.

As I told her at the time, this was quite a find, but even more so since both the Unruh and Kintzer generations were direct-line ancestors of mine! In fact, including my fourth-great-grandfather Johannes Kintzer, the son of Johann Jacob and Anna Catharina, and the baptismal sponsors of one of Valentine Unruh’s daughter, my fifth-great-grandparents Jacob and Catharina (Unruh) Wilhelm (with wife being a sister of Valentine Unruh, to boot), a total of seven direct-line ancestors of mine are mentioned in the three pages of register in the Bible.

Of course, by the time Earnest submitted her article, the auction of the Bible had taken place, but the auction house dutifully forwarded my letter to the winning bidder. He called me and we had a conversation about the Bible but he was disinclined to resell it so the trail ended there.

I had saved his voicemail—but hadn’t caught his name since the message was a bit garbled—but it was lost during one or another phone upgrade over the years.

Fast forward to a holiday party near the end of December. Our hostess told me that her boyfriend Michael had brought a long a Bible from Lancaster that he talked about 12 years ago.

None of this clicked with me as anything familiar after all this time but I dutifully tracked down Michael at the part, only to be gobsmacked that the Bible he’d brought along was indeed the Unruh Bible with those three pages of family register.

 It was almost an out-of-body experience for me as Michael retrieved the Bible in its large box and there we scrambled placing it on the floor—this was a sumptuous party with every table space taken up with food!—and Michael gave me the opportunity to example the Bible and take it with me to photograph.

Both the Wilhelms and Unruhs were from Niederhochstadt in the Palatinate and the families arrived on the St. Andrew in 1734.

 Needless to say, I’m ecstatic finally being able to see and touch this 300-year-old family heirloom.