Starting from the top left!
I really do love the cover that the talented Brady McNamara designed for Lineage. I had an idea that the cover could mimic the look of my Instagram account, @VernacularGenealogy, which aims to show lots of different genres of genealogy in early America. But my vision was more like a set of tiles around the central title. Not being a designer, I couldn’t see what Brady could see. Expertise in action.
So in the weeks leading up to publication I thought I’d share a bit about each of the objects that are on the cover. One of the challenges of this concept is that as you’ll see in the book, which had quite a few illustrations there is a lot of genealogy that is not nearly as eye-catching as what made the cover cut. A lot of manuscript text, some –to me– exceptional examples of hand stitched notebooks with small pages. A lot of print in the form of laws and court reports. So part of sharing the individual items from the cover is to highlight that range of materials and part of it is to offer some context.
This birth certificate from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, is dated July 27, 2776. For Christoph Cobrech (Koppricht), it’s part of an incredible collection at the Newberry Library, available online. The Klaus Stopp collection contains over 1400 German American birth and baptismal documents, dated from 1700-1900. Many, like this one, are Fraktur, a distinctive style of art and lettering. There is so much to the elaborate, exuberant figures and colors here, but I especially adore the birds. And the heart, of course. Always more to say about such an object, but I’m leaving this brief and will be looking forward to saying more about this and much else as I start to schedule events around Lineage!
