This is my first post in this community, until now I've only popped up in comments to others' posts.
Behind the lj-cut are urls linking directly to images are of the book. Printed all in German, but published in the USA. I think it might be a hymnal, but the print type has made it near impossible for me to try and translate. I'm very much hoping that someone here can help me understand/translate it. The book is from the late 1800's or early 1900's.
Here's the cover:
( Book Images )This book belonged to my great-great grandmother on my mother's side of the family tree.
The family were immigrants from Germany, possibly Berlin. The Raschke's (this branch of my family tree) were charter members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, locally known as the German Methodist Church. It was organized in Lexington, Texas in 1882.
The church purchased two acres of land for a cemetery in November 1898. The first recorded burials on this site were those of two-year-old Reinhold Retzlaff and four-year-old Gustav Hillegeist in the spring of 1899. Also interred here are Civil War veterans Bernhard Retzlaff (who fought for both the Union and the Confederacy), Jacob Seifert, and Gustav Urbantke, who served as a lay minister for forty years. Others buried here include members of the Bauer, Grusendorf, Hillegeist, Hornung, Letterman, Otto, Peterson, Raesener, and Raschke families.