Sponsorship letter

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Sponsorship letter (Bischwiller, Alsace, 1698)

A handwritten, painted or printed sheet of paper in which the godfather wrapped the gift of money for the person to be baptized is called a godparent letter , in Alsace Göttelbrief , in Switzerland baptism slip. The custom was widespread in the German-speaking area among both denominations.

The oldest surviving German sponsorship letter is dated to 1593. In the 17th century the custom of sponsorship letters spread among the bourgeoisie and reached its greatest popularity in all strata of the population around 1750. From 1850 onwards, interest declined, and by 1900 sponsorship letters were considered out of date.

The sponsorship letters contained sayings or verses from the Bible. Printed copies often show a child baptism scene, the baptism of Jesus, or other biblical motifs. Conveniently, some sponsorship letters were divided into three horizontal fields so that they could be easily folded up. Later they were glued envelopes with an insert card. Not only were the sponsorship letters kept (a baptized person received several, one from each sponsor), but also their contents. It should not be given as a "lucky penny". In addition to money, breadcrumbs and salt were also wrapped in the region, which should bring prosperity.

Since the sponsorship letter was signed and dated by the sponsor, it was considered a document and later served the person to be baptized as a certificate of baptism and a birth certificate . Sponsorship letters may therefore occasionally have been kept in the files attached to the marriage register of the registry offices. Emigrants brought the custom of sponsorship letters with them to Pennsylvania, where calligraphy and the illumination of birth and baptismal certificates developed into a separate branch of everyday culture (“Fraktur”).

The letter of appeal ( godfather letter ), with which someone was invited to assume the sponsorship office , is to be distinguished from the sponsorship letter .

Web links

Commons : Patent letter  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Commons : Fraktur (folk art)  - collection of images, videos and audio files

literature

  • Antje Helling-Grewolls: Sponsorship letters. In: Bettina Seyderhelm (Ed.): A thousand years of baptisms in Central Germany. Schnell & Steiner, Regensburg 2006, ISBN 978-3-7954-1893-9 . Pp. 231-234.
  • Christa Pieske : The sponsorship letter. Berlin 1942, Wachsmann, Münster 2017, print ISBN 978-3-8309-3640-4 .
  • Christa Pieske: About the sponsorship letter. In: Contributions to German folklore and antiquity (1958) 2/3, pp. 85–122.
  • Juliane Schröter: baptism slip. On the history of an almost forgotten type of text in Switzerland in the 18th and 19th centuries. In: Britt-Marie Schuster, Susan Holtfreter (ed.): Textsortenwandel from the 9th to the 19th century. Files for the international conference at the University of Paderborn from 9. – 13. 6. 2015 (= Berlin Linguistics Studies. Volume 32). Weidler, Berlin 2017. ISBN 978-3-89693-662-2 . Pp. 135-168.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Simon J. Bronner, Joshua R. Brown: Pennsylvania Germans: An Interpretive Encyclopedia . Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 2017, pp. 270 .