[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Questions on baptism

[Sigrid Pohl Perry]

Hi Sarah,

I was on the team that indexed Lublin Holy Trinity Evangelical records 
and saw many German records like this one. The Napoleonic paragraph 
format usually showed two male witnesses; often one of them was 
indicated as a godfather. Generally, there was one female godmother. 
Sometimes a midwife (hebame) was named. These German records with a 
printed format with spaces for names and data follow that same basic 
format. Usually, there are two male witnesses and one female godmother. 
I have seen other baptism records where two married couples were named 
as godparents. Sometimes notes are written to indicate the relationships 
in the baptism aside from what is on the form. In my personal records I 
always noted who the witnesses/godparents were, knowing that they were 
most likely members of the extended family or very close friends in the 
absence of family. I generally looked for how these people might be 
related because it helped find other family members unknown to me.

You can read about the Lublin records indexing project here: 
https://sggee.org/research/parishes/lublin_records/lublinsearchinstruct.html
The records on the FamilySearch site are the first of the digitized 
records to be released. Agreements were made by the LDS with various 
Evangelical churches in Poland for records which had never been 
microfilmed. Some of these "raw" records relate to those in the Lublin 
Project database. However, they are organized differently and do not yet 
include all of the Lublin parish records in the database. We have not 
had time to attempt any correlation. However, if you find your family in 
the Lublin database on this page, you can be assured that eventually the 
digitized records will become available on the FamilySearch site.

Regards,
Sigrid Pohl Perry

On 12/29/2015 5:29 PM, Sarah Nielsen wrote:
> Thanks to Rose Ingram for linking to the Poland Evangelical Records. I started looking around in the Kobylki book and found pages full of documents with my family's names on them. I just have some questions about what a baptism likely involved.  Here is a link to one page:
>   https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QS7-L99H-89ZV-H?mode=g&wc=QZW1-Q2J%3A1588932888%2C1588932897%2C1589088144%2C1589087769%3Fcc%3D2564996&cc=2564996
> Rather than having two godparents listed, they instead have (based on my best understanding from google translate) two male witnesses. Then under the listing for Pathen (google translate says that means godfather) there are the names of two women. In some of the records one of the women's names has the word jungfrau in parenthesis. Jungfrau apparently means maiden/virgin so I am assuming it means unmarried. So were the men just witnesses or would one of them acted as a godfather? Why were there two women listed?  Any other information that anyone knows would be welcome.
> I am just wondering because I see so many familiar names all over records throughout this record and I wondered how closely they were tied to these people with names I don't recognize.
> Thanks,
> Sarah
> 	
> 		
> 			
> 		
> 		This email has been sent from a virus-free computer protected by Avast. www.avast.com
> 		
> 	
>   		 	   		
> _______________________________________________
> Ger-Poland-Volhynia site list
> Ger-Poland-Volhynia at sggee.org
> https://www.sggee.org/mailman/listinfo/ger-poland-volhynia