To the Latest Posterity examines family registers—records of such information as births, marriages, and deaths. As the fourth publication in the Pennsylvania German History and Culture Series, the book is understandably narrow in geographic and cultural focus. While it briefly considers related practices in Europe (such as church records and family coats of arms) and in America (including ink on silk, needlework samplers, tinsel registers, Hebrew-language records, and punched-paper embroidery), this volume concentrates on paper-based family registers created for German-speaking immigrants and their descendants. In particular, authors Corinne and Russell Earnest trace a tradition of manuscripts embellished in the fraktur style—records that feature decorative angular script or print and often colorful illumination.
The authors, who have published numerous books on genealogy and fraktur, clearly intend this volume as a guide for local researchers. A glossary translates German terms that family historians might encounter in these documents, from the archaic Hornung (February) to more obvious cognates like Sohn (son). The Earnests also gloss specialized English terms; they explain that “Dunker” identifies a member of the Church of the Brethren, while “boilerplate copy” refers to standardized text, and they suggest how to interpret the family name variations that resulted from Anglicization. Other aspects of the text cater to fraktur collectors. Appendix A lists the names, dates, and locations of fraktur artists and scriveners who drew and/or infilled family registers; thus, the authors do not equate “folk” with “anonymous,” instead adopting names like “the Footed Letter Scrivener” to identify artists who did not sign their work. Appendix B traces historical changes in family registers, permitting easier dating, tracing, and pricing of artifacts.
Nearly half the book is devoted to classification and description, and this is the work’s greatest strength. The authors are careful to address previous fraktur studies, especially those less rigorous than their own examination of more than one thousand original examples. For instance, the Earnests resist the temptation to posit a unilinear, chronological (d)evolution beginning with the hand-decorated document and ending in the printed or mass-produced register; on the contrary, they argue, register types developed concurrently, responding to individual preferences and practicalities. Several of the six register types they identify in Chapter Five are hybrid forms. Thirty black and white illustrations and thirty-seven color plates amply demonstrate the richness of these documents, which are filled with accretions—additions in different hands, startling colors, embellished margins—that provide a palpable sense of time and change.
Throughout the book, the authors attend to both texts and decoration, noting in addition that family registers have always been commodities, with paid professionals and commercial products playing a large part in their construction. Chapter Two defines fraktur, points to the historical roots of lettering and illumination, and surveys the kinds of documents that have been worked in fraktur style. The authors take a broad view, refusing to exclude registers on the basis of handwork, illustration, time period, or language alone. Chapter Three compares New England family registers—often textile-based—with fraktur documents. While some decorative motifs were common to the two traditions, the authors assert that Pennsylvania-German registers are characterized by the “spontaneous” and “fanciful” creations of self-trained artists, while New England registers favor “more somber and formal” symbolic trees, architectural features, portraits, and neoclassical figures. The chapter also details the mutual use of family Bible inserts and suggests that regional differences lessened with the advent of mass-produced engravings and lithographs in the mid-nineteenth century. Chapter Four analyzes register texts and concludes that their lacunae—such as missing ancestral names, dates, and places; the frequent omission of women’s names; and the failure to indicate relationships among persons—can be frustrating. The authors speculate that these incomplete records were intended to break with Europe and concentrate instead on present and future generations.
One recurring, sometimes implicit, idea is that both hand decoration and professional printing endowed the registers with added value, ensuring their preservation. The authors also suggest that fraktur registers evidence both an “ethnic sensibility” and an American experiment in celebrating humble origins and the promise of the future. The prologue and epilogue connect family record-keeping in general to (American) national pride, and the book asserts that family registers were born on American soil, with little relation to Old World precedents. These ideas, along with the claim that today’s family records now stress function over form, would benefit from further contextualization, as well as more rigorous attention to the influence of class and taste on cultural expression and consumption. Nevertheless, To the Latest Posterity offers an impressive and well-documented display of a long-standing but rarely considered vernacular expressive form; as such, it will both prompt and aid future investigations.
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[Review length: 767 words • Review posted on March 2, 2006]