The Ledgers of St. Matthew's

Guide for Users

The Ledgers of St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church
Transcription Notes

The Ledgers

Three handwritten ledgers provide data 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 “Pathen”/godparents/sponsors
  • Confirmations: dates of examination, confirmation, first communion; name of confirmand; birth date of confirmand; origin (birthplace) of confirmand. The dates of examination and first communion have not been entered into the database.
  • Deaths: date of death; name of the deceased; age at death; origin and relationship status, e.g., son/daughter of, wife/husband of, widow/widower of, marital status; cause of death. The date of burial has not been entered into the database unless it is the only date recorded in the ledger (i.e. date of death is unknown or missing).

Names

Names have been entered as they appear in the handwritten ledgers. Please note that:

  • Christian names are frequently abbreviated, for example, “Marg.” [Margarethe], “Henr.” [Henriette], “Joh.” [Johann], “Wilh.” [Wilhelm].
  • The same name may be spelled differently, for example, “Frederich/Fredrich,” “Catharine/Catharina,” “Louise/Louisa,” essentially as determined by the scribe; if communicated verbally, the name may have been misheard and misspelled accordingly.
  • Over time—or by choice—changes occurred in the spelling of surnames, particularly in those with umlauted vowels (a,o,u), for example, Döscher > Doscher, Müller > Mueller, Pfähler > Pfaehler, Bösch > Boesch.
  • It is advisable to enter the name with the umlaut, if applicable, as well as with the umlauted vowel replaced by the vowel + e (ae, oe, ue).
  • Alternative spellings are frequent: the user is encouraged to evaluate other data in the record to determine if the individual is in the database under a variant spelling.

Dates and Ages

Birth, baptism, confirmation, marriage, and death dates are formatted DD/MM/YYYY. When part (month or day) of a date is missing, I indicate in the note field that the date is a default date (01/01/YYYY).

Age at death is formatted YY.MM.DD, i.e., number of years/months/days old.

DATA IN ENGLISH

While constructing the dataset as an exact replica of the original record would have allowed the user to observe the gradual process of native-language loss, the intent to make the data more accessible for the contemporary user argued for presenting some of the data in English. 

Occupation

Found primarily, if inconsistently, in the marriage and death records, the German terms have been translated into ”best-case” English. In the absence of a one-for-one equivalency, I have used a close approximation; generic descriptors, such as “Kaufmann,” “Mechaniker,” or “Seeman” have remained generic, replaced (in these cases) with “businessman,” “mechanic,” and “mariner.” 

Cause of Death

In the effort to express the German descriptors in the ledgers in currently recognizable terminology, I have relied on A German-English Dictionary of Medical Terms by Frederick Treves and Hugo Lang (London: J.A. Churchill: 1890), to mediate between archaic and more contemporary nomenclature. Often I cite the German term in brackets as a check on the “translation.” I have used the single expression “emaciation [likely consumption/tuberculosis]” to translate the numerous German terms [Verzehrung, Auszehrung, Zehrung] descriptive of tuberculosis. Although the bacterium was discovered by Robert Koch in 1882, the term “tuberculosis” does not occur in the church records until 1903.

It should be noted that the reported “cause of death” was more often than not the “diagnosis” of a lay person (family member, neighbor, landlord, etc.), since most deaths at the time occurred in the home and did not require verification by a physician.

Origin

All instances of “Charleston, South Carolina” are rendered as “Charleston, S.C.”

The province, state, and city of Hanover is spelled with one “n” in English; with two “n”s in German, i.e., Hannover. 

Marriage Witnesses

German descriptors in the wedding commentary other than the names of the witnesses and/or bridal party, are given in English, e.g., “matron of honor,” “ushers,” “flower girls,” as well as honorifics and other identifiers.

Orthography

In an effort to establish consistency in the dataset, all instances of the German “Eszett” or “scharfes S” in the ledgers are written as “ss”.

Additional Sources

Jones, Robert Alston. Charleston’s Germans: An Enduring Legacy. Charleston, 2021.

Mehrländer, Andrea. The Germans of Charleston, Richmond, and New Orleans during the Civil War Period. Berlin/New York: DeGruyter, 2011.