I am republishing an old post today, but for a different reason than normal. Without going into details, both my personal Facebook account and the museum’s Facebook page have been experiencing issues. My personal account has now been restored, but we are still experiencing a situation in which our museum Facebook page is useless to us. Perhaps some of you have noticed that our blog posts have not been shared with our Facebook page for about a week now. I am planning to meet with others at the museum today to attempt to solve our problem. Therefore, I need to spend more time there and less time on composing a post.
I found a previous story that has special significance today. The couple in the attached post about the Dietrich family would be celebrating a special anniversary today. They were married on September 3, 1874, so today would be their 150th wedding anniversary.
One of the additional facts about that wedding is that the church record for that marriage is found in the books of Trinity Lutheran Church. It was the first marriage record placed in that congregation’s books by Rev. J.F. Koestering. Pastor Koestering had begun his ministry at Trinity in 1864, but for the first 10 years of his time at that church, there are no marriage records in the church books. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that we often refer to this as the “Koestering Hole”. Marriage and death records are part of that hole. Rev. Koestering did included baptism records throughout that time period, but nothing else. We do not know the reason for his omission of those records. However, when Julius Dietrich married Louise Schneier in 1874, he began including marriage records in the church’s books.
Sadly, not as many people as we have been accustomed to, will be reading this post today because, until we solve our Facebook problem, it will not be shared there to get more people to read it. So many of our regular readers find our blog posts because of our Facebook presence. Hopefully, our museum will not have to start a new Facebook business page and lose all of our faithful followers. Please pray along with us that this problem gets solved in a way that helps us continue our mission of preserving the history of German Lutheranism in East Perry County.