Beginning in 1716, the church kept a detailed handwritten record of attendees at church services. The first list here seems to be people who took communion at the Epiphany service.
In the early 1700s, a small Zumbrunnen family was living in Baden-Württemberg, the German state just to the north of Switzerland. This post is an overview of the records pertaining to this family found in the church book of the Lutheran Parish Waldtann, located outside the town of Crailsheim, Germany.
This book includes baptisms, marriages, deaths, and church attendance. The attendance records begin in 1716 and almost immediately there are at least four different Zumbrunnens in the church books: Johann Peter (Petrus) Zumbrunnen, Anna Ursula Zumbrunnen, Balthasar Zumbrunnen and Barbara Zumbrunnen.[1]
The handwritten records can be very hard to read. The surname appears to be written variously as Zumbrunnen, Zumbrunnenin, Zumbrunn, and Zumbrunnin. (German-speakers in this region added “-in” to women’s surnames in this era). Sometimes there’s a space after Zum and sometimes not. Later in the records, they tend to favor the shorter spellings. These records support the theory that the family was originally named Zumbrunnen and that this branch truncated the spelling in the early 1700s.
The records contain detailed attendance lists that appear to be the people who took communion at the major holidays like Advent, Pentecost, and so on.
Balthasar and Barbara appear to have been in the front row for attendance at Pentecost in 1726. Note her name appears to be written as Zumbrunnenin and she’s identified as a widow.
In 1729, for the first time, we find a new name in these records: Johann Heinrich Zumbrunnen. Johann Heinrich Zumbrunn was the immigrant ancestor of the Zumbrun family in America. He was married in Schwegenheim, Germany in 1749, but prior to his marriage, neither Heinrich nor any other Zumbrun was listed in their church books. Heinrich’s hometown was somewhere else. These records have finally revealed where.
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