ROOTS & BRANCHES

Fraktur, the Pennsylvania German folk art often in the form of baptismal certificates, has been a fascination of mine for a long time.

There’s the practical aspect to it: Such certificates—which also exist for marriages and sometimes other life events—are sometimes the only extant recording that exists for that birth, baptism or marriage.

And there’s the aesthetic side: Such documents are beautiful artifacts of their times.

Over her lifetime, the late Corinne P. Earnest made it her mission to document the artists and scriveners who created Fraktur (Personal interest warning: She helped me on many occasions—sometimes inadvertently alerting me to Fraktur and family Bibles related to my personal pedigree!—and was a columnist when I was editor of Der Kurier, the journal of the Mid-Atlantic Germanic Society).

About four years after Corinne’s death, daughter Patricia C. Earnest and husband Russell D. Earnest have published the third edition of Papers for Birth Dayes: Guide to the Fraktur Artists and Scriveners, a weighty four-volume compilation of the life work of the “Queen of Fraktur” is available.

For someone such as me who is a mere dabbler in Fraktur, leafing through the more than 1,500 pages filled with information about nearly 600 artists and scriveners makes the head swim.

Each individual’s life and works are profiled along with a high-quality photography of a sample or two of their work. In the profile are often the “tells” that distinguish one artist’s work from another’s.

Very interesting to me are some of the names that Earnest or others give to artists whose identities have remained elusive. Some are merely geographic such as the “Mahantongo Valley Artist.” But other handles such as the “Flying-Angel Artist” or the “Footed-Letter Scrivener” are wonderfully evocative.

Because of the huge size of Earnest’s database, only up to ten examples are listed for each artist or scrivener “with priority given to examples illustrated in readily available sources.” This seems unfortunate but to do otherwise likely would have made what is already a small encyclopedia unmanageable.

Also included in the set is a listing of more than 1,250 minor or potential artists and scriveners as gleaned by the authors from Fraktur collections, the literature, the Internet, auction catalogs and antiques shows.

The volumes’ introduction also clears up many misconceptions about Fraktur:

• Some 70 percent of Fraktur were done by schoolmasters and only a relatively tiny number were done by pastors.
• Fraktur was a Pennsylvania German invention rather than a continuation from German-speaking Europe.
• Fraktur baptismal certificates were not, by and large, buried with the individual.

For information on buying the third edition of Papers for Birth Dayes, go to the website www.rdearnestassociates.com. or write to Russell D. Earnest, P.O. Box 1132, Clayton, DE 19938.