Pennsylvania German Church Records [set]

Description

Here in three volumes the genealogist has access to all of the church records ever published in the Proceedings and Addresses of the Pennsylvania German Society. These records are indispensable to anyone interested in Pennsylvania-German origins, but until now they have been almost impossible to locate as few libraries have a complete file of this scarce serial publication.

From the beginning the Society showed an interest in publishing the earliest-known records of the German Reformed and Evangelical Lutheran Church in Pennsylvania. With Vol. III (1893) it began the task of putting such records into print. Church records were deemed then to be the backbone of Pennsylvania-German genealogy, and nothing has happened to change that idea. Before the Society wound up its project, it had succeeded in publishing the records of a great many key churches in southeastern Pennsylvania–Lancaster, York, Lehigh, Montgomery, and Northampton–the heartland of Pennsylvania-German country.

In these three volumes are births, baptisms, marriages and burials, the records that identify people and their relationships to one another–not only parents and children, husbands and wives, but witnesses and sponsors as well. A staggering 125,000 persons are mentioned in these records, and every one of them is cited in the new indexes, which have been painstakingly compiled especially for this publication. The records themselves answer the usual who, where and when questions, but because of their magnitude, because of the vast number of people who figure in these records, they must now be accounted, in the aggregate, as the very basis of Pennsylvania-German genealogy.