Louise Arnold has volunteered at the MAB for over five years. In the past, Louise managed a nursery school as well as an independent sewing business before transitioning to a career in legal work. Following retirement and after seeing a call for volunteers in the local newspaper, Louise began volunteering with us as a Moravian Roots indexer in January of 2017.

Indexers enter information from church registers of Moravian congregations into a computer database. Louise has indexed an impressive eighteen registers: two handwritten in English, and sixteen handwritten in German! Louise studied German from the third grade through college and had grown up with her grandparents speaking Pennsylvania Dutch. Moravian Church registers, however, typically feature an old German script called Kurrentschrift, which is no longer used or easily read by native German speakers. “I had to learn the German script, which wasn’t too difficult to do,” explained Louise. “It’s just a matter of learning the meaning of each letter like you do with a cryptogram.” However, like fellow Roots volunteer Richard Miller, Louise conceded that the shift from one pastor to the next requires some adjustment for the indexer. “Everyone writes differently. You get used to each pastors’ idiosyncrasies after a couple of pages,” she explained, adding with a laugh, “And then you have pastors who write in half English, half German, which is interesting.”

Other entertainment for Louise has come from the sense of feeling like a first-hand participant in the story of a congregation or its members. “Especially with the smaller congregations,” said Louise, “when you finish [indexing] the register you feel like you know everyone in the congregation, because you’ve basically been following people through from the time they were baptized to the time they passed away.” Emphasizing this, Louise recalled an incredible story about having indexed the baptism of an infant girl in a New York City register and later indexing her marriage decades later in a Wisconsin register. Being an avid reader and admirer of history, Louise enjoys these personal stories as well as bits of world history in entries, such as references to the American Civil War or Spanish flu.

Several years ago, Louise became ill with cancer but continued her volunteer work whenever possible. For her, the Roots project was a welcome distraction, “because it didn’t have anything to do with getting cancer treatment,” she said, stressing that it has also been a pleasure to work with a friendly staff here at the MAB. In addition to her volunteer service at the Archives, Louise is heavily involved with the Young People’s Philharmonic of the Lehigh Valley, currently serving as its board president. We congratulate and express our gratitude to Louise on five years at the MAB!