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Second German Evangelical Lutheran was one of the earliest German-speaking congregations established in Baltimore, Maryland. Fortunately, the surviving baptismal and burial registers of Second German Lutheran Church are intact from its founding in late 1835 until its closure in late 1867. The original documents are entirely in German. The author has transcribed the German entries as closely as possible from the original within the limits of legibility. The majority of this work is divided into baptisms, burials and confirmations. These three sections are arranged alphabetically by surname. Each baptism entry includes the following information: surname, child's given name, birth date, baptismal date, father's given name, father's place of birth, mother's surname and given name, mother's place of birth, surname and given name of witnesses, and comments. Total baptisms from 1837 until 1867 were 3,042 with more than 12,000 names. Each burial entry includes the following information: surname of decedent, given name of decedent, date of death, date of burial, birth date or age, place of birth, survivor(s) and comments. Because survivor information is provided, it is relatively easy to see how the deceased fit into a given family. The total number of burials entered from 1837 to 1867 is 1,046 with roughly 2,500 names. Unfortunately, there is an incomplete record of confirmations, and confirmation data are rather scant. These entries typically include: surname, given name and date of confirmation. The total number of confirmations is 822. An index is provided to all names other than the subject of the event, as subjects are already listed alphabetically by surname. Since there are so many geographic place names extracted from this church register, a place name index is also included. ... Read more

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The Montgomery County Sentinel was first published as a weekly newspaper in 1855 by Matthew Fields and has been continuously published, with brief interruptions, until the present. The early focus of the paper was on advertising and politics, with relativ ... Read more

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Mr. Hurley's Our Maryland Heritage series continues with this book, which investigates the Higgins families, primarily of Montgomery County, but also includes family members found in other Maryland counties and elsewhere. Chapter one presents the scant in ... Read more

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In 1777, four hundred men from the Eastern Shore of Maryland raised a red-coated regiment, pledging their loyalty to king and mother country. Yet for more than two hundred years, their story remained untold. Maryland Loyalists in the American Revolution describes for the first time the lives of these officers and soldiers, examining their beliefs - and the heavy price they paid to uphold them. During the years of tumult and upheaval, great numbers of loyalists lost their homes, their livelihood, and their lives. When war came to an end, many surviving loyalists were banished to Nova Scotia. As they fled, a tragic shipwreck dealt the final blow. Rare and previously unpublished documents portray these forgotten loyalists, bringing to light their struggles and hardships. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Adds a new dimension...
This is one of those books that truly added a new dimension to my understanding of American History.I'd recommend this book for anyone who has ever visited the Liberty Bell, hummed Yankee Doodle or read the Declaration of Independence.Examining the motivation and the outcome of those Colonists who chose to support the British against their next-door neighbors really added another layer to my appreciation for the magnitude of the actions that resulted in American independence.(The Civil War wasn't the first war in the US to pit neighbor against neighbor.)

The author does a great job of placing context around the day-to-day, as well as the life-changing decisions made by the early American settlers as everyone was faced with "choosing sides".

Not a boring text-book, but an engaging, well-documented story about a little-known aspect of American history.If you like to gain insight by looking at history from all sides of the story this book will appeal to you.I really enjoyed it.

One of those great "I didn't know that!" kind of books.
Truthfully, I've never really been interested in the American Revolution by this book dragged me kicking and screaming into the middle of what the author calls "America's First Civil War".New is interested in the nobodys, the people who didn't make it in the history books.I mean, yeah, yeah, we all know about Washington.Washington did this, Washington did that, blah, blah, blah.This book, though, took me into the life of the common loyalist soldier -- something I sure didn't know about.I also liked New's style.He doesn't write like some snubby academic.This loyalist history is real accessible to anyone curious to know something about history.I definitely recommmend it ... Read more

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In view of the fact that the bloody Battle of Antietam was fought in WashingtonCounty, Maryland, it is perhaps ironic that no prior account of the role of Washington Countiansin the Civil War has ever been published. Armed with a mere handful of names, Roger Keller, aresident of Hagerstown in Washington County, decided, some ten years ago, to set this situationto rights. In this remarkable book, he has compiled all that is now known about 1,200Washington County natives who fought on either side of that great conflict. Open the book toalmost any of the accounts, and you will be struck by the extraordinary pull which the Civil Warexerted on these men's lives. Lives like that of Charles Bean, who moved from Hagerstown toTexas, later to serve in Gen. Hood's Brigade at Sharpsburg then lose a leg at Gettysburg, beforereturning to Texas after the War. While most of the notes pertain to the combatants themselves,interspersed among them are biographical sketches of a score of Washington County physicianswho enlisted in the war and a handful of noncombatants who became swept up in it. This revisededition features a new alphabetical arrangement of the participants, as well as about fiftysketches not included in the original edition. Mr. Keller, who has consulted all the major sourceson the Civil War in Maryland--he cites them in his bibliography--has written a book that ismoving and informative. It is must reading for anyone interested in the genealogy or history ofthe Civil War in The Free State. ... Read more

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"This record of shortsighted destruction may help save the city's remaining wood, stone, and brick treasures."-- Baltimore Magazine

They fell victim to fire and time, road builders and city planners, the schemes of short-sighted developers, and their owners' neglect. From the red-brick shops and taverns of colonial times to the monumental banks and theaters of the early twentieth century, the lost buildings of old Baltimore represent an irreplaceable part of the city's heritage. Now, in this revised and beautifully redesigned edition of Carleton Jones's popular retrospective, the vanished structures of Baltimore's past are made accessible to a new generation of readers.

Each of the more than one hundred entries includes a photograph, the building's exact location, the years it was built and razed, and a paragraph describing its architectural and historical significance. Also included are lively and informative essays giving an overview of Baltimore's colonial, Federal, antebellum, Victorian, and "golden city" periods of architecture. Churches and saloons, temples and courthouses, public buildings, townhouses, office buildings, and country mansions--the structures ofLost Baltimore have lost none of their power to stir the imagination.

" Lost Baltimore is valuable for its collection and presentation of buildings we can know now only through pictures and text. The book is likely to hold its interest over the long term."-- Maryland Historical Magazine

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This work is a list of about 16,000 marriages recorded between 1778 and 1800 inchurch records and other contemporary documents. Arranged alphabetically by grooms' names,each entry lists the bride's name, the date, and sometimes parents' names and the source ofinformation. With an index to brides. ... Read more

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An introductory high school textbook surveying the history of Maryland, with emphasis on the blacks, women, immigrants, and other special groups contributing to the variety of its population. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Amazon Tricked me
I purchased a new copy of this book from Amazon.The look inside features shows the book is in color.Instead, the copy I received was black and white, printed on thick, rough paper, as if someone copied the pages and bound them.This is unacceptable and should have been noted on the page.Unfortunately, I did not notice until after my return window expired.So check your copy as soon as you receive it. ... Read more

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Charles Carroll of Carrollton is most often remembered as the sole Roman Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence. In this monumental study of the Carrolls in Ireland and America, that act vindicates a family's determination to triumph without compromising lineage and faith.

Ronald Hoffman peels back layer after layer of Carroll family history, from dispossession in Ireland to prosperity and prominence in America.Driven to emigrate by England's devastating anti-Catholic policies, the first Carroll brought to Maryland an iron determination to reconstitute his family and fortune.He found instead an increasingly militant Protestant society that ultimately disenfranchised Catholics and threatened their wealth and property.Confronting religious antagonisms like those that had destroyed their Irish ancestors, this Carroll and his descendants founded a fortune--and a dynasty that risked everything by allying with the American Revolutionary cause.

Meeting each crisis with a tenacious will to survive and prevail, the Carrolls earned an esteemed place in the new nation.Hoffman balances private lives against their contentious public role in American history.The journey from Irish rebels to American revolutionaries shaped and shattered the Carrolls--and then remade them into one of the first families of the Republic. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Good history book
Purchased this book for my Grandmother.Apparently we are related on her side of the family.Thought she would enjoy reading.I purchased one years ago when my daughter had to do a report on someone famous in your family.I found the book very interesting and informative.

A history of continuities
This is perhaps the most pleasurable "academic" history I have come across. Although it provides an extensive account of life in the Chesapeake through the lives and business dealings - and there are plenty of those enumerated - of the tenacious Carroll family, I was also struck by Ronald Hoffman's major theme of family continuity, of purpose driven by recollection and ambition that the Carrolls had in spades.The very tightly researched accounts of the family history in Ireland, and of all the other families like them in the chaos of the 17th century, is little short of astonishing.I'll admit to an enduring interest in Irish history, but this one illustrates why Carrolls and others left their broken aristocracy. That continuity touches on my own forebearers, one of whom was a first cousin of Charles Carroll of Carrollton's.She married another Irish immigrant Marylander and set out in 1796 to populate the then frontier in Kentucky with other Catholics, I am sure at direction of one of their neighbors in Upper Marlborough, MD, Fr. John Carroll, first Catholic bishop in America and also Charles' first cousin.A great read on many levels.

How to build an Aristocrat?
Traditional patriotism demands that we believe that the founding fathers of America were all great democratic idealist.Although this may have been true for some, many others had no problem with the idea of an elite ruling class, so long as they were considered the elite.Thus the victory over England can be viewed as less of an American Democratic Revolution and more of a power transition from the English crown to the new American aristocracy.

A primary example of this American elite class was Maryland representative Charles Carroll of Carrollton.A signer of the American Declaration of Independence, Charles of Carrollton was a wealthy planter and businessman who became such not by his own doings but primarily through the inheritance and molding of his father, Charles Carroll of Annapolis.Ever mindful of his Irish and Catholic roots and the persecution therein by English aristocrats, the elder Charles did everything in his power to equip his son to fend off those who would attempt to cripple him politically and economically.In so doing, the elder Charles created a mindset of elitism within his son.

This irony is highlighted by Ronald Hoffman in his book, "Princes of Ireland, Planters of Europe," in which he examines the Carroll family and traces how a persecuted family from Ireland in 1500 came to be one of the prominent families in America by the time of the American Revolution

Eye-Opening History of Colonial and Revolutionary Maryland
Ronald Hoffman is an excellent historian who has brought great knowledge of Chesapeake social and cultural history to this biographical work that places three generations of the Carroll family within their colonial context.It is a wonderful biography that gets the reader into the minds and lives of these three Charles Carroll's. But for me the best thing was the number of times it made me think, "Oh, that's how it was." I have read enough colonial history to know that there were lots of tenant laborers and not just slaves in the region, to know that Catholic Maryland quickly became Anglican Maryland, and to know that the Revolution was not just about ideas but also about social change.Ronald Hoffman's narrative, however, really brings these facts home.His book is not about any one of these issues in particular, but in telling the story of three generations of Carroll's in Maryland he brings home the greater circumstances of the colony better than many historians who have set out to make a case for one of the above arguments, or many of the other fascinating takes on early Chesapeake society contained in this highly readable book.I have not read any book lately that I enjoyed more.

Rigorous Analysis Yields Engaging View of Colonial Life
I was originally attracted to this book out of a simple curiosity about the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence (Charles Carroll outlived Adams and Jefferson by about six years, or about 56 years after 1776!).On a deeper level, I hoped to learn more about the kind of early capitalist that would be attracted to signing on to the American Revolution in general.What this book helped me discover was a family that had over time become focused, almost obsessed, with making a buck under fairly adverse circumstances (namely, continuing in their Roman Catholic faith that made it difficult for them to thrive, even in an enclave as seemingly sympathetic as colonial Maryland, with its relatively large Catholic population).But when the time came for this family to rise above its simple wealth building and to champion the cause of the Revolution, it did indeed rise to the occasion, however brief and painful the process might be.(Hoffman attends to both the private and public lives of the Carrolls.)The history of the Carrolls is a part of the history of the magic that was the American Revolution. It is not surprising that the book ends abruptly with the death of Charles Carroll's father and his wife, about 10 days apart from one another in 1782 (though there is a brief summing up of Carroll's remaining 50 years and the attention attracted by his death in 1832).The story is told, the dynasty pretty much complete.

What's the book like?At times it seems downright willfully prosaic, and the story proceeds much like a carefully written doctoral dissertation - all conclusions fully supported and made in as logical a context as possible, all contentions politically correct for our time.Hoffman's goal is of course to be scholarly and thorough, not to be entertaining or controversial.Thus the sweep of this history must emerge and coalesce in the mind of the reader.Leave being beaten over the head with the broader conclusions inherent in the narrative to more popularly written histories.

Suffice it to say, if you're a municipal library and you need to beef up your Revolutionary War material, this is a prime buy.If you're a true history buff, this would be an excellent choice to work into your reading list. It has the effect of immersing you into the spirit of the times and providing you with detail you could not have imagined you would find interesting (but you do).If you're a casual reader, just be advised - this is heavy stuff.It's not an easy read, but it is ultimately a rewarding one. ... Read more

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This book is a research tool for locating the men and women of Calvert and St. Mary's Counties, Maryland, who served in the military, rendered material aid to the army or navy, took the Oath of Allegiance and Fidelity, served in an office or on a committe ... Read more