Index of Cumberland County Birth, Wedding, Divorce & Obituary Newspaper Records - 2003
This index runs from January 1, 2003 through December 31, 2003.
The German Lutheran and Reformed Churches in Cumberland County, 1763-1793
In order to understand the early years of the German Lutheran and Reformed churches in Cumberland County, we need to know something about the beginnings of these two churches in colonial Pennsylvania and also about the pattern of the county's early settlement.
Although a small number of German families arrived in Pennsylvania in 1683 and established the village of Germantown, the peopling of the province proceeded very slowly. An estimate of colonial population in 1720 gives Pennsylvania about 31,000 people, making it the sixth in rank among the then twelve colonies and placing it only slightly ahead of New Jersey, with about 30,000. Fifty years later, in 1770, Pennsylvania had an estimated 240,000 people and ranked second to Virginia.
It was during the half century between 1720 and 1770 that most of the Germans came into the province. The peak years of immigration were 1749- 1754. Understandably, this heavy influx of strangers frightened some political leaders, including Benjamin Franklin and William Smith, and it is interesting to speculate what might have happened had not the French and Indian War all but halted immigration. The war did something else. It proved beyond a doubt how groundless were the fears of those who thought that the Germans might violate their oaths of allegiance to the British Crown and ally with the French in the contest then being waged for control of North America. Although accurate population data are not available, it is probably safe to say that at the time of the American Revolution the population of Pennsylvania was about equally divided among English, Scotch-Irish (whom contemporaries called Irish), and German elements.
To a Quaker merchant, an Anglican justice of the peace, or a Presbyterian farmer, the Germans presented a bewildering variety of religious persuasions. There were Mennonites, Brethren or Dunkards, Ephrata Brethren, Moravians, Roman Catholics, and others. Perhaps this variety tended to obscure for most outsiders the fact that the large majority of Germans in colonial Pennsylvania - possibly close to 90 percent- had Lutheran and Reformed backgrounds. Probably most outsiders also never fully understood that these Germans were not a homogeneous lot. They came from different states of southwestern Germany and Switzerland, and they brought to Pennsylvania their own dialects, customs, and pride in their particular culture.
The German Lutheran and Reformed churches belonged to separate Protestant families. They differed in their beliefs on such important subjects as baptism and the Lord's Supper, as well as on how worship services should be conducted. They had a record of sometimes bitter hostility to each other in Europe. Nevertheless, the gap between them was considerably narrowed among the German Lutheran and Reformed people who came to Pennsylvania. In fact, it is preferable to study the two churches together in that province, as well as in Maryland, Virginia, and New Jersey, each of which had its eighteenth-century complement of German inhabitants. The strongest reasons for studying Lutherans and Reformed together are that they lived side by side almost everywhere Germans settled in Pennsylvania and because they intermarried so frequently. As early as 1747, less than five years after he arrived in Pennsylvania to take up his duties as a Lutheran pastor, Henry Melchior Muhlenberg wrote that "the members of both faiths are so intermarried in this country that here you will find a Lutheran husband with a Reformed wife and there a Reformed husband with a Lutheran wife." There are many contemporary accounts to corroborate Muhlenberg's observation. Half a century later, Lutheran and Reformed pastors were still testifying to the existence and prominence of the same phenomenon.
Most of the Germans who came to colonial Pennsylvania, whatever their religious persuasion, were relatively poor. While as farmers they could produce almost everything their families needed to subsist from year to year, it usually took some time for them to develop a dependable source of money income, part of which could then be used to help support their newly founded religious institutions. In a country such as Pennsylvania, where religious liberty prevailed, they could expect no help from public authorities in establishing or maintaining these institutions. Moreover, in a place where the support of churches was entirely voluntary, a situation virtually unknown in Europe, one could expect and indeed one would find- a critical shortage of properly trained and regularly ordained pastors. Most European clergymen who had met the long-established educational and other qualifications for induction into the Lutheran and Reformed ministry viewed Pennsylvania parishes as among the least desirable in their church.