“Check out this funeral entry,” Karen says with intrigue to the volunteer across from her, also indexing funeral entries from church registers in the archives. She adds, “This one is for a member of the Bethlehem Congregation who was tragically killed in a train wreck in 1900. The pastor wrote that ‘fourteen souls were hurled into eternity in the twinkle of an eye!’” Surely, a bit of a morbid thing to get excited about, but for archives volunteer Karen Huetter it’s these colorful funeral entries that allow one to learn so much about—in her own words—“the dearly departed and their relationship to the living: types of illnesses, burial locations, families, jobs, and the increasing role of hospitals and asylums for the care of the sick, injured, and dying.”

Sitting across the table from Karen, fellow volunteer Marsha Beers curiously inquires, “Have you heard of a midwife in 1700s Nazareth named Johanna Schaefer?” Thanks to Marsha’s tip, Karen has embarked on a personal side research project investigating midwives and their roles in Moravian communities. Marsha and Karen are no strangers, or, well, they were before meeting at the archives to volunteer on the Moravian Roots project several years ago. Now they carpool to the Archives on Wednesdays and meet for lunch regularly: a bond forged in mutual admiration of interesting life stories told in church registers, and in shared frustration over sloppy handwriting.

“Kannst Du mir mit dieser Schreibschrift helfen?” (can you help me with this handwriting?) Marsha says in German to assistant archivist Tom as he passes by in the reading room. For more than a decade, Marsha brought her German classes on fieldtrips to the MAB for instruction in German script handwriting, led by assistant archivists Lanie Graf Yaswinski and Tom McCullough. Over the years, she dabbled herself in trying to learn the old script. Upon her retirement from teaching in 2018, Marsha began volunteering on the Moravian Roots project—and with that—indexing German-language entries from Nazareth Moravian Church’s first church register covering the years 1742 to 1861. The variety of difficult hands prompted Marsha to enroll in the archives’ annual German Script Course, a course Karen also completed way back in 1971. Having successfully completed the course twice now, Marsha is a pro of sorts when it comes to deciphering the German-language baptisms, marriages, and funerals.

Karen’s path to volunteering at the Archives is a bit different than Marsha’s. Before coming to the archives, she had worked in social services for most of her life, supporting blind and visually impaired people. Intermittently, she worked for the Red Cross and twice for Historic Bethlehem Partnership (now Historic Bethlehem Museums & Sites). She began working at Historic Bethlehem in 1970 and went on to complete a master’s degree in history. “And that is what has given me an interest in the Moravians…and in learning about the Moravian community, I just absorbed it and really loved it, from writing to programming to research,” she recalled. Regarding her volunteer work at the archives, Karen says “It’s a nice quiet place to be, and it takes your mind off of other things you might have been doing at home, and you can think about history and what goes on — and the Moravian Archives is a wonderful repository.”