Let the analysis begin!

I'm in process of scanning all those documents I got from the Lutheran church up in Manitoba. I've scanned about 30 of the little slips of paper with different church records on them - confirmations, weddings, deaths, births, and a couple that I'm still not quite sure what they are. But I've seen a couple of very interesting snippets of data so far - my great-grandmother Augusta Joseph was one of the witnesses for her sister Olga's wedding to Gustav Hoeft in 1906. She also appears in 1908 on some kind of record related to a marriage for her cousin Olga Joseph (daughter of Gottlieb and Justine (Foth) Joseph) to Philip Oswald. Then in 1912, after she'd married Charles Steffan, she was one of the godparents for her cousin Wilhelmina Magdalena Liona Siegel, daughter of Wilhelmina (Joseph) and Karl Siegel.

It's awesome to have more records of my great-grandmother like this. I mean, before this I'd found her death certificate, a couple of censuses, two marriage records, her passenger list to America from Liverpool, her family's border crossing from Manitoba to the US, and a newspaper mention for her first marriage. But all those other records, at least to me, didn't really connect her to her family the way these church records do. The other records (except for the marriages) report where she was at a given time. These records show how she interacted with her relatives, participating in church ceremonies with them. For some reason, it just seems to make her come more alive in my mind.

In short, I think these records are going to teach me a lot about my family. I'll probably need to take my time with them, get them translated, analyze them, and probably do a little background research into what these ceremonies meant for them as Lutherans. Let the analysis begin!

PS I'm probably going to create a Flickr account for these. If you want to see them and download them for yourself, check back in a day or three and I should have an update to this post with the web address for the album.