In 2002 my wife Margie and I traveled to Germany and visited Reichensachsen. We stopped at the village church and were graciously given the opportunity to view a multitude of old church record books. We began our search by looking for the baptisms of the children of John and Anna Bittner. We knew that all of their children except Adam were born there. Not only were we successful in finding their baptism entries, but we also found baptism and marriage records for several earlier generations of the family. All of these families lived in Reichensachsen from about the mid 1700s. See photos of the village on the next page.
Since it was our last full day in Germany, we had limited time to spend looking at the records. We occupied several hours copying and photographing records from the church books. We concentrated on records for John Bitner’s immediate family and their direct ancestors, although we came across some related lines that will be discussed later. While we did a thorough job of scanning the books to find records of this family, we did not have time to search all the records to trace related family lines. As far as I can determine, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) has never copied these church books to microfilm.
The first item we noticed was the original German spelling of the family names. John’s full name at his baptism was Johannes Böttner. Though the surname is spelled differently in German, the pronunciation is very close to how we pronounce Bitner (or Bittner) in English. We find the name spelled either of the latter two ways among the generations in America. John’s brother Casper spelled his name Boettner. Anna’s German surname was Külmar, which in English is rendered as Kilmer. The pronunciation is very similar, regardless of which way it is spelled.
The second item we discovered was that John and Anna had two other daughters who died before they left for America. We also noticed some discrepancies with the birth dates of the children, compared to the information we found in the United States. Since the church book entries were made at the time of the baptism of the children, they have a higher probability than later sources of being correct.
The church books were very well preserved, and the entries quite legible. The later books that we examined (1830s and 1840s) had preprinted pages with standard columns for the entry of information. The earlier books contained blank pages and each entry was hand written as a separate paragraph. They generally contained the same items of information about the child and parents. The entries from the 1770s and 1780s are similar, but were much harder to read due to problems with ink blots, bleed-through, and poor penmanship. A transcription of selected records follows. I also photographed the entries for John Bitner’s immediate family and ancestors.