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44 AMERICAN CATHOLIC HISTORICAL Socrrrrv.
odds and ends of information about persons, places and things
that the student was sure to glean from their register-pages,
we miss sadly.
Our more modern church-books, kept as they are now-a-days
by rule on a species of machine-made plan, giving the merest
statements of fact in the meagerest form of otiicial terminology,
while thereby wholly in accord with statute are yet of far less
interest to read through this very lack of old-time gossipy and
half-encyclopaedical character. (But we must take our records
as we find them.)
As will be observed the final dates in this volume (No. II)
vary greatly, according as the clerk got to the end of the pages
assigned him for the registration of given matter.
The baptisms (in this Series) close with the year 1807 ; while
deaths and burials are recorded as far down as 1818; and mar-
riage-entries run along one year at least later, if not two.
The reader will notice that in our translation of the Latin of
the Christian names facobus, Anna, Maria, these (according as
we thought would be their equivalents in English) have been
rendered variously Jacob and James, Anna and Ann, Maria
and Mary.
Among the death-notices is the record of a black child,-
the only person of color in this Series,-named “Frederick
Green,” who died aged three years on September 15, 1813.
The baptisms, running from I801 to 1807, all administered
by Rev. Paul Erntzen, number three hundred and twenty-
seven (327), including two (2) pairs of twins, and seven (7)
illegitimates, whose names, (we refer only‘ to the latter-the
only unfortunates at birth) as well as any trace even the faintest
that might lead to their identification,-these we have carefully
kept from our pages for reasons the reader will not be slow
to recognize as meet and just.
The deaths and burials (down to 1818) number ninety-seven
(97) ; the marriages (to 1819, or, maybe 1820, for the last
entry in the volume is not clear as to the year,) one hundred
and seventy-nine (1 79.) .
With this paper (on Goshenhoppen mission-records) extend-
’ ing for sixty years and upwards from the year 1741, when the