ROOTS & BRANCHES

I’ve probably not referenced my favorite genealogy book nearly enough in this column.And that’s probably because, technically speaking, late Charles H. Glatfelter’s 1980 book on the Lutheran and Reformed ministers and churches of the 18^th century is not a genealogy book.Titled in full Pastors and People: German Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Pennsylvania Field, 1717 –1793, Volume I: Pastors and Congregations, Glatfelter’s tome is my bible when I start researching a new area to mine its church registers, which are often the only available documents to record births, marriages and deaths for the 1700s and much of the 1800s in Pennsylvania.When I say that Pastors and People is not a genealogy book, I’m probably slighting it a bit: Glatfelter’s intent was to identify all of the pastors and the congregations they served, which maybe is not as easy as it would seem to us in the modern day.That’s because church organizations were just beginning throughout Pennsylvania—both on the frontier and even in Philadelphia—and determining when a congregation took form from just people meeting in homes, for instance, isn’t always clear.Likewise, a significant percentage of the men presenting themselves as ministers to these ethnic German people were not ordained by their Lutheran or Reformed religious bodies in Europe.There was a severe shortage of clergy throughout the 18^th century in America among the German-speaking communities, and these “irregular ministers” filled a necessary void.But even if his book is not aimed at genealogists, it is valuable to all family historians with this type of ancestry. As part of his narrative on each congregation’s founding, Glatfelter indicates whether and when a register of baptism or other pastoral acts was begun; in the same way, he indicates if a pastor kept a private register of his ministry.Among the many insights I’ve learned from Glatfelter is that genealogists need to be careful in evaluating the church registers. He found it was typical once a register book was purchased for baptisms to be “back entered” for founding families of the congregation, meaning both that these entries were not contemporaneous to when they happened (making their accuracy less reliable) as well as whether they even were performed in the community of that congregation.But most of all, I treasure Glatfelter for his disarming wit when he’d go about debunking the founding date a congregations attributes to itself (which is often a generation or more earlier than actual records exist).A good example is in his narrative about Walmer’s Union Church in Lebanon County, the origins of which he shows as 1772:“There is a charming and old tradition that in 1750 Peter Walmer told his six sons, ‘Boys, we must have a church.’ And six days later, they had a thirty by thirty-two foot building, complete except for a floor. Until there is some historical evidence to deal with, we must regard this for what it its: a charming and old tradition, with no known basis in fact.”