A collection of fraktur created in Europe and assembled by Dr. Don Yoder. Many of the fraktur included in this group were used by Yoder to argue that Pennsylvania German fraktur were derived from the professional handwriting of officials of local and regional government and folk-cultural traditions in Europe. These include examples from Austria, Silesia, Alsace, and Switzerland. Wedding contracts, letters from godparents, a birth certificate, and a baptismal letter are among the forms found in this collection. Some objects are quite rare, such as the Taufzettel, which would have been folded around a coin and presented to a child by godparents after his or her baptism. Also included are 3 prayer books, several birthday and New Year greetings, indentures, wills, instructions for making soap (from Lititz, Pennsylvania), and a circa 1850 American lithograph entitled "The Follies of the Ages, Viva la Humbug!" These fraktur document the parallels in teaching between Protestant schools in Europe and America: both sought schoolmasters who could write legal or ecclesiastical documents, teach children to write and to read texts and music, and play an organ for church services; both also had access to German and Swiss writing manuals. This collection makes it clear that American fraktur both compared and differed in significant ways from European examples: they were not official governmental documents, they incorporated both old and new designs, and they combined elements from writing manuals with folk motifs.
