October 13, 2011

Baptismal Fraktur of Mary Comfort - Treasure Chest Thursday

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my surprise discovery of two large, old rolled-up parchments in my aunt’s basement. The parchments, beautifully illustrated and written in Gothic German, turned out to be the original baptismal frakturs of my great-grandparents, John Llewellyn Eberhard and Mary Madina Comfort. To me, this discovery of original documents that my aunt didn’t realize she had and couldn’t identify brought home the old adage, “You never know unless you ask.” I think a lot of family historians can relate to finding pieces of their puzzle in places they never expected.

In that first post, I presented Llewellyn’s certificate, which you can see here. Today I’d like to share Mary Comfort’s fraktur. I’m no expert at reading German script, but I've been told it’s not all that difficult to decipher the family information from records like these. Those of you that have more experience with this are welcome to correct any errors you see! Here is the portion of Mary’s certificate with her birth and baptism information:




My admittedly very rough translation is as follows:

Louis A. Kumfert
and his wife Polly
who was born Scheirer
had a daughter born to them on the 28th day of
May in the year 1875
Their daughter was born in Whitehall
Township in Lehigh County
in the state of Pennsylvania in North America, and was
baptized on the 18th day of November in
the year 1875 by the Pastor J. S. 
Renninger and given the name
Mary Madina
The sponsors are:
the parents
[signed] Wm. Gross

Just goes to show, like love in Love Actually (one of my favorite movies), treasure is all around us!

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4 comments:

  1. What an amazing find and treasure, Shelley . . . you just never know! Congrats!

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  2. Good work Shelly. The pastor was J.S. Renninger. This link should take you to a Google books Lehigh Co. history. If not, you can just Google Renninger pastor Lehigh http://books.google.com/books?id=j7VL8u8BCkUC&pg=PA119&lpg=PA119&dq=renninger+pastor+lehigh+county&source=bl&ots=w55S9J5gDR&sig=xqpB9vvbISZURvBXLduZ6MR08Fc&hl=en&ei=rqidTr-kI4Tn0QHl2MWECQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&sqi=2&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=renninger%20pastor%20lehigh%20county&f=false

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  3. Thanks, Gini--it was a thrilling find for me!

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  4. Thank you for the link, Ycpa. It worked perfectly and I'm glad to have the info on the pastor. I've added the book to my Google ebook library. Really appreciate the tip!

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