ROOTS & BRANCHES

I’ve previously related the tale of how an Unruh-Kintzer family Bible naming a total of seven direct-line ancestors of mine came into my possession.

The skinny on that is that more than a dozen years ago, my good friend the late Corinne Earnest had alerted me to the existence of this Bible, which was printed in 1720 in Basel, Switzerland, and likely came across the water with Valentine Unruh’s family when they came to American on the St. Andrew in 1734.

It took a long time until I had the opportunity to buy the Bible but it now has taken residence on my living room coffee table with its three pages of baptismal and marriage entries.

Covered are the records of the baptisms of two of Valentine Unruh and his wife Catharina (maiden name Wilhelm), one of which names Catharina’s brother Jacob Wilhelm and his wife Anna Catharina (also my ancestors) as sponsors.

The Bible then goes on to relate daughter Maria Elisabetha’s marriage to Johan Jacob Kintzer (two more of my ancestors), as well as a flock of baptisms for their children, including their son Johannes Kintzer (the line from which I descend).

Soon after I had learned of the Bible’s existence in 2014, I was talking to Dorothy Wagner, a woman at what’s now my former church, and discovered that her maiden name was Wilhelm and that she likely descended from the Jacob Wilhelm and Catharina Unruh who were the baptismal sponsors.

So I told her that if I ever tracked down that Bible, I’d make sure she had a chance to see it.

That took a long time, but finally I had the opportunity for Dorothy (and her sister Marjorie) to stop by and see this 300-year-old family artifact.

They brought along a family scroll researched by their brother Fred, and it confirmed that we stem from the same immigrants Jacob Wilhelm and Catharina Unruh, diverging a couple of generations later in America but staying in the same Tulpehocken region of Berks County, Pennsylvania.

Wagner asked me if I could read the cursive German script in which the Bible entries are written, and I told her that I could if you give me enough time, and I realized then that I’d been relying on Earnest’s summary of those baptisms all these years without trying to do every-word translations, which can be tedious, especially when taking into consideration archaic words and spelling variants—which is why I recommend Katherine Schober’s Germanology Unlocked as a translator!

But I decided to take this as a challenge and transcribing and then translating the baptismal entries yielded interesting vocabulary and ended with the daughters’ astrological signs.

Each of the Unruh daughters’ entries included a phrasing I’d never seen, using the word “beschert” (bestowed), with the full phrasing giving the birth date and then saying that God had bestowed a little daughter on them that day.

Here’s to the praise of ancestral artifacts!