A Nineteenth Century Birth Certificate
January 3, 2012
HERE is another handmade Pennsylvania German birth certificate in the fraktur style. It records the birth of Elias Nicholas in 1823 and was created by a young woman named Elizabeth Borneman Dieterly. The inscription records the names of the infant’s parents and godparents, the date and location of his birth, and a few other important details. It also includes this message:
Scarcely born into the world, it is only a short measured pace from the first step to the cool grave in the earth. O with every moment! Our strength diminishes, and with every year we grow more ripe for the bier.
And who knows in what hour the final voice will awaken us, because God has not revealed this to anybody yet. Who tends to his house will depart from the world with joy. Because surety, in contrast, can provoke eternal death.
[in lower left]
I am baptized, and when I die, how can the cool grave hurt me? I know my fatherland and legacy that I will have with God in Heaven. After death, Heaven’s garment of joy and celebration is prepared for me.
[in lower right]
I am baptized, I stand united with my God through my baptism. I therefore always speak joyfully in hardship, sadness, fear and need. I am baptized, that’s a joy for me. The joy lasts eternally.
[Translation and image courtesy of Free Library of Philadelphia]
— Comments —
Joe Long writes:
“…it is only a short measured pace from the first step to the cool grave in the earth. “
On a birth certificate!
Moderns often get the impression that the nineteenth century was just plain morbid when seeing things like this. Certainly for the nineteenth century family, the Reaper is an uninvited, but clearly acknowledged guest at many events where we wouldn’t expect him; we’d refrain from greeting him in the hopes that he’d just go away awhile. But the need to confront mortality – because death really could happen at any stage of life and with no decent notice given – was real, and they faced it directly.
I particularly like some of the old “shaped-note” hymns, which are quite simply meditations on mortality. One that I recall describes “heaps of bones” and says, “These once were strong as mine appear – and mine must be as they.” That’s the closing line; no mitigation is offered. The singer is left looking into his own grave a long moment; it is a song simply meant to sober the believer.
How I long to throw the lyrics onto the PowerPoint projector among the “worship choruses” one fine Sunday morning.
Laura writes:
Even funerals today are lacking in a sense of mortality.
