Taufschein Inventory

I have been working on an inventory of our Taufschein collection at work. Taufscheins are printed birth and baptismal certificates that were used by the Pennsylvania Germans as a decorative memorial to record the birth and baptism of children in the nineteenth century. They were printed in English or German and record information which is useful to genealogists today. The majority of the document is printed, but the personal information is manuscript. The manuscript was done either professionally by a scrivener or done by a family member. Taufscheins record parents' names, including the mother's maiden name, the child's date of birth and baptism, where the child was born, who performed the baptism, and who the child's sponsers were. They are not official birth certificates, but merely decorative and commemorative. They are also sometimes mistakenly called Fraktur. Fraktur are a form of illuminated manuscrpipt, and while Taufscheins are closely related to Fraktur, they were really another form of folk art. Both are ususally written in German script and use bright colors to decorate but Fraktur are all manuscript and Taufscheins are printed (in other words, mass-produced) and filled in. My inventory includes all of the information mentioned above and will hopefully provide our researchers another source of genealogical information.