The Ledgers of St. Matthew’s German Lutheran Church
Charleston, South Carolina
The Church Records
In its effort to maintain a record of those affiliated with it, the newly founded St. Matthew’s adhered to the tradition whereby parish registers (marriages, baptisms, burials) had served as the primary civic record from late medieval times until secular registration systems were introduced in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century. In Charleston, by virtue of the state’s Church Act of 1706, the Anglican/Episcopal registers constituted the vital records of the city from 1706 to 1821, when the city began keeping a record of deaths.1 St. John’s Lutheran Church had kept the record of that congregation since its founding in the mid 1800s; there was every reason for St. Matthew’s German Lutheran Church to do the same.
Three ledgers, handwritten in German longhand by various scribes, provide data on the German immigrant community for the period from 1840 to 1923 as follows:
- Marriages: date of marriage; names of groom and bride; respective ages; respective origins; identifying relationship details and/or occupation (of groom); names of witnesses
- Baptisms: name of child; date of baptism; date of birth; names of parents; parents’ origin; names of sponsors/godparents (“Pathen”)
- Confirmations: dates of examination, confirmation, first communion; name of confirmand; birthdate of confirmand; origin (birthplace) of confirmand
- Burials: dates of death and burial; name of deceased; age at death; origin; relationship/marital status, e.g., son/daughter of, wife/husband of, widow/widower of; occupation; cause of death
For fifty of the eighty-three years of record-keeping, St. Matthew’s was served by the pastorate of Reverend Louis Mueller (1848-1898). In a tribute after his death, the Charleston News and Courier of April 17, 1899, noted that his record of service included 4,402 baptisms, 1,440 confirmations, 1503 marriages, 4,163 burials, and 50,000 “visits.” Mueller’s pastorate was followed by that of his son, the Rev. W.A.C. Muller, who served the congregation from 1892 to 1922. Except for the early, brief, pastorates of Reverends F. Becker and William Heemsoth, the handwritten ledgers that have been transcribed to comprise the database can be considered the “Mueller/Muller” records.
As would be expected, the ledgers include the names of the 262 men who had, in 1840, declared their intention to become members of the 1840-chartered St. Matthew’s German Evangelical Lutheran Church, as well as the names (many the same) of those who were owners—in whole or in part—of the pews in the new church that were sold in April of 1872. The names of second- and third-generation descendants of the immigrant founders would be added to the registers in the years that followed, as well as the names of others brought into the congregational fold by the church’s expanding footprint in Charleston.
A Few Observations
Marriage
The records suggest that single men married as soon as feasible, readily finding wives anxious to avoid an unprotected and economically vulnerable spinsterhood. Most first marriages were between individuals 18-24 years old. Second marriages usually involved individuals in their 30s and 40s, many widowed by the city’s high mortality rate at the time. There is little doubt that both the immigrant male and female thought it easier to survive the rigors of immigration and acculturation as a couple rather than going it alone.
Families
Establishing a family in the South Carolina Lowcountry was challenging due to the high infant mortality rate. According to the baptism registers, couples having 1-4 children—not all of whom would live to adulthood—were the norm, as indeed was the case for the Charleston community at large. Larger families, however, were not unusual in the ethnic community, nor in the host. For most of the nineteenth century, couples had many children because it was expected that not all of them would survive to adulthood. The records here show twenty-three immigrant families with five children, seventeen with six, fifteen with seven, thirteen with eight, eight with nine, two with ten, six with eleven, one with twelve, one with thirteen and one with fourteen. The latter record suggests a family steadfastly in the Lutheran fold: married in 1873 when she was twenty to the Prussian Oskar Prause, Julia Catharina Tienken, born in Charleston to German parents, gave birth to fourteen children between 1874 and 1894. The family’s records show that ten Prause siblings lived to adulthood: eight were confirmed and four (two sons and two daughters) would connect the Prause name to other families through marriage to German-Charlestonian spouses, effectively passing their German heritage to future generations.
Work
Occupations identified in the records reflect the complexity of earning a living in the host community. Many of those immigrating were from rural areas where they had lived and worked within a completely different kind of local economy. On a personal level, it was questionable whether the immigrant male—single or married—could expect to “be” in his new homeland what he had “been” in the old country. The Charleston economy during the relevant period has been described as one of “a wealthy, planter/plantation elite…, an enslaved majority that served the white population in almost every capacity, and a small class of free laborers and artisans who practiced the service functions that the composite society relied on.” Immigrants to Charleston would have to find a niche in the social order where they could operate without openly competing or antagonizing those who were already in place.”2
In that context, a great number—if counting, more than three hundred—set themselves up as grocers. This was not the choice of a “trade” for which they had been trained, but rather a simple business plan to earn a living by selling provisions to their immigrant and Charlestonian neighbors. With varying degrees of success, these German-Charlestonian grocers would become something of a hallmark of the city: over time, hardly any neighborhood would be without its “corner grocery” run by a German immigrant or the descendant of one.
Not unexpectedly, the records indicate that smaller, but still substantial, numbers earned their living as cabinetmakers and carpenters (74), shoemakers (74), bakers (46), tavern keepers (46), tailors (41), and “businessmen” (51). Even smaller numbers worked in a variety of other traditional occupations, e.g., as apothecaries, blacksmiths, locksmiths, mechanics, butchers, and railroad workers.
Mortality
The church records leave little doubt that the immigrants who came from northern Europe to Charleston in the American South were affected by the radically different climatic conditions of the Lowcountry. The recently arrived immigrant had little immunity, particularly for the myriad fevers that plagued the South, compared to those in the host community. The latter had adjusted to the endemic dangers over the years, knew what to expect as the seasons changed, and had devised ways—and had the means—to avoid them. The plantation class had always moved to “healthier” climes upstate when the city was expected to be especially “infectious.” Most of the others had no choice but to stay and suffer the consequences.
For the minority ethnic community, life in the hot and humid Lowcountry at a time when medical knowledge was still something of a guessing game amounted to a constant battle with death. According to the records that identify the cause of death (not all do), among the most frequent causes cited are stroke, fever (typhoid and other), consumption/tuberculosis, pneumonia, and yellow fever. The prevailing high infant mortality rate is attested by the significant number of the German community’s children who died of diphtheria, scarlet fever, whooping cough, “cramps,” “teething,” croup, “summer sickness” (a kind of cholera), or who were born prematurely or stillborn.
It is worth considering what some of the other “causes” of death specified in the records suggest about the immigrant experience in Charleston: seven deaths attributed to alcoholism (difficulties sufficient to “drive one to drink”?); fifteen individuals dying from being “burned” (accidents with stoves or other heating sources in crowded quarters in wooden houses?); thirty who “drowned” (unfamiliarity with the dangers inherent in local waters?); twelve “murdered” (violence among community members?); thirteen—doubtless, men—who “shot himself” (hunting accident, unfamiliar weapon, or intentional suicide?); twelve by “suicide” (despair, inability to cope?); and twenty-three of heat/sun stroke (disregard for the dangers inherent in the local climate?). Not everyone in Charleston’s nineteenth-century German community would have thought their experience warranted an endorsement of “dies süsse, dies sonnige Leben” (this sweet, this sunny life).3
the data
The granular nature of the data in the church records encourages broad-brush analyses such as those above: they provide a statistical perspective to the effort to better appreciate what the German immigrants experienced as they undertook to create a new life in a new land and become integrated into the society that had taken them in. The “facts” in the individual records comprising the dataset also enable analyses of a more personal nature.
Earlier studies have all maintained that, in spite of its minority status, Charleston’s German community had an outsized effect on the character of its nineteenth- and twentieth-century host society. Inasmuch as the St. Matthew’s Church ledgers present the collective record of those immigrants who participated, actively or passively, in the evolution of the city, the ledgers are a vector to connect an important aspect of Charleston’s nineteenth-century past to the present—perhaps the best way for current generations to appreciate what it has meant to the city to have had North German immigrants cross the Atlantic and become Charlestonians.
Searching the Transcribed Ledgers
When searching the transcribed records of the database, the search result is presented as a composite record of those events (birth, baptism, confirmation, marriage, death) recorded for the individual.
Accessing the LEdgers at the Lowcountry Digital Library
The digital versions of the ledgers are high-resolution PDF documents. The scans are clear and complete. Beginning page numbers of the ledger sections as below: entries on the pages are in chronological order.
| Parish Record | PDF Page |
|---|---|
| Volume I, Marriages and Deaths 1840-1900 | |
| Marriages | 7 |
| Deaths | 112 |
| Volume II, Baptisms and Confirmations 1840-1900 | |
| Baptisms | 9 |
| Confirmations* | 291 |
| Volume III, Baptisms, Confirmations, Marriages & Deaths, 1870-1923† | |
| Baptisms‡ | 9 |
| Confirmations | 190 |
| Marriages | 256 |
| Deaths | 328 |
* Parents listed in Confirmation records only until 1848.
† Beginning in 1920, almost all entries are in English.
‡ Beginning on page 182, all origins are Charleston, S.C. or the Charleston area.
Notes
- Not until 1877 did the city keep a register of births. ↩︎
- Ira Berlin and Herbert Gutman, “Natives and Immigrants, Free Men and Slaves: Urban Workingmen in the Antebellum South,” American Historical Review 88 (1983): 1175-2000. ↩︎
- As in the quote in Michael Everette Bell’s 1996 dissertation title (cited in “About the Church”). ↩︎