ROOTS & BRANCHES

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” shared the welcome announcement that the long-running series of genealogy books German Immigrants in American Church Records (GIACR for short) will be concentrating on Pennsylvania starting in 2025.

GIACR is the masterwork of retired Brigham Young University Professor Roger P. Minert, who has marshalled a generation of BYU students to the work of abstracting specific references to German immigrant origins from their church records, producing some 40 volumes from states from Ohio to Texas.

When I received word that GIACR would be putting together volumes from Pennsylvania registers, I remembered with somewhat wry amusement what someone had told me years ago about Minert’s disdain for Pennsylvania’s 18^th century church records as being of little use.

As if! There’s definite truth that fewer immigrant origins are found in the 18^th century records of these “First Wave” German-speaking immigrants than those of the “Second Wave” that mainly populate the registers in the Midwest.

But it’s also the case that the First Wave in colonial times was less than 100,000 people whereas the Second Wave was as many of 5 million. But more importantly as far as the “worth” to descendants living today—because the First Wave had roughly a three- to five-generation head start over the Second Wave, it’s likely true that roughly equal numbers of individuals living today have ancestry from those respective waves (Ancestry.com apparently calls this concept “name reach,” according to Joe Everett, who once worked for Ancestry and is currently the family history librarian at BYU in addition to being associate editor for GIACR).

As I thought about all this, I came up with a few “facts on the ground” in Pennsylvania that I hope Minert and his team take into consideration:

• The gamut of “church records” in the 18^th century mid-Atlantic is much less standardized and somewhat more limited vs. later iterations.
• To wit, very few church burial registers exist for the time of the First Wave, but nearly all of them were buried in church cemeteries—sometimes with tombstones bearing record of their origins.
• Likewise, there are ministers who didn’t record their marriages in church registers but reported them to German-language newspapers.
•  In both the 18^th century and continuing well into the 19^th century, many ministers of the ethnic German Protestant congregations (primarily thinking of Lutheran and Reformed here) kept their own private pastoral registers, sometimes instead of using congregational records at all but other times containing additional information (like birthplaces of the people involved in the pastoral acts) that wasn’t also recorded in a congregation’s books.
• Just as with some areas of Germany, some congregations’ records include “family registers” that bring together all the data about a family unit (several of Pennsylvania’s early Moravian congregations kept these and were written in a narrative format conducive to listing immigrant origins).

Last week’s column listed the factors in which Minert’s team is interested. Readers with specifics on the church records being sought can email Minert at rogerpminert@gmail.com.

 Minert also solicits tax-deductible donations for wages for student team members at his website, www.rogerpminert.com