A new exhibit of frakturs is opening Saturday at Colonial Williamsburg’s Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum.
The exhibit, called “Paper Trail: Recording Rites of Passage in German-Speaking America” includes 17 frakturs created in Virginia and Pennsylvania. Frakturs are colorful and fancy watercolors and illuminated manuscripts that usually record life events such as birth and marriage before centralized recordkeeping. An elaborate alphabet of fractured letters was favored for formal documents.
“When these frakturs were created, there was no unified German nation such as we know today,” said exhibition curator Barbara Luck, recently retired from Colonial Williamsburg’s division of collections, conservation and museums, in a release. “Many German-speaking immigrants who settled in America hailed from areas outside the present-day Germany, particularly Switzerland and portions of France.”
The most common fraktur certificates were of births and baptisms usually on the same page. Rarer frakturs have birth, confirmation, marriage, immigration and death information on the same page because the certificates could be made at any point in time. Adults sometimes had birth certificates made for themselves. Sometimes parents commissioned certificates for all family members at the same time from a single fraktur-maker.
Frakturs peaked in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; many of the frakturs in the exhibit are from that time period. The term fraktur has a broader meaning now, and includes bookplates, songbooks and rewards of merit.
The exhibit will be on view through June 2015 in the Mary B. and William Lehman Guyton Gallery. A Colonial Williamsburg or museum ticket is required for admission. Tickets are available for purchase online.
