Information missing in FHC microfilm at Family Research

By mawyn on Tue, 11/15/2022 - 14:22

Forums

A contact of mine pointed me to a very perplexing church book page at Family Search.

I've looked through the pages on the film but can't find a target or any reference to the church book that the page is actually taken from. Clicking on the "Information" tab on the page takes me to the following page:

https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/345809?availability=Family%20History%20Library

This is where I get the information I use about the church that the church book is allegedly from. I looked up the name of the church in the small village Leiha online and found the name "St. Ursula".

Here's the citation I've come up with:

St. Ursula (Leiha, Germany), Kirchenbuch, p. 412 left [added later], lines 6-10, date illegible, Johann Gottfried Hermenthal death and burial (1735); current repository unknown; imaged at Family Search (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CSCJ-D392-3?cat=345809 : accessed 15 November 2022) > digital film 1271378 > image 400. Actual name of the church and location not evident from the film material but provided by the Family Search site.

Comments appreciated.

It looks like the book has been damaged, maybe burned, so that the page is no longer completely there. If you're interested, a transcription of the lines that interest me reads like this:

[...]br: früh halb 8 Uhr ist der Wohl Ehrenwürdige und Wohlgelehrte H. Magist: Johann Gottfried Hermenthal im HErn seelig entschlaffen, und den 14 mit Christl. Ceremonien zur Erden bestattet worden, …

Roughly translated:

[illegible name of month] at 7:30 in the morgen the honorable master Johann Gottfried Hermenthal died during his sleep and was buried on the 14th with Christian ceremonies …

Thanks!

Submitted byEEon Tue, 11/15/2022 - 15:39

 

Hello, Mawyn. You've done well. EE would be tempted to expand your citation just a bit:

St. Ursula (Leiha, Sachsen, Preußen, Germany), Fragment of Unidentified Church Book, p. 412 left [added later], lines 6-10, date illegible, Johann Gottfried Hermenthal death and burial (buried 14 December 1735); imaged at Family Search (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CSCJ-D392-3?cat=345809 : accessed 15 November 2022) > digital film 1271378 > image 400;current repository not stated. The actual name of the church and location are not evident from the filmed material; those details are provided in the cataloging entry at FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/345809), which also states that the material was filmed from a manuscript "in Berlin, 1937."

Explanations:

  • Given that there may be multiple communities called Leiha in Germany, EE would add the additional jurisdictional names.
  • Given that we don't have an exact name for the book, EE would use a descriptor rather than "Kirchenbuch" (which would then need translating but is woefully incomplete in and of itself). A church of its age would have many such Kirchenbücher, not just one.
  • The month of the burial is shown in the first word of the entry: Xbr. That would be the tenth month, which was then December.
  • Re "Repository not stated," Evidence Style citations for registers imaged online address the source-of-the-source data in the last layer of the citation, reporting what the just-cited website has to say about where the imaged records can be found. Ergo, I moved the statement "current repository not stated" to that position after the citation to the website and its image.
  • Given that "provided by the FamilySearch site" does not tell the reader where amid the billions of records at FamilySearch you found that information, I expanded upon this with a citation to the catalog page.