The hundreds of thousands of people who came to America aboard small, crowded ships did not have the luxury of taking much with them. Although furniture and household utensils had to be left behind, they could and did bring their traditions, arts, and skills. The immigrants not only adapted their native crafts and customs—their most precious cargo, as it turned out—to their new surroundings but often improved on them. In these virgin environs, where many settlers owned land and tasted political freedom for the first time, the urge to enliven, enrich, record, and leave one’s own mark for posterity was unquenchable.

The melding of an Old World heritage with New World vitality is one of the glories of the illuminated manuscripts of the Pennsylvania Germans, who first migrated to the Commonwealth in 1683 at the invitation of William Penn. These immigrants set great store by written proofs proclaiming that they and their culture had survived the arduous journey across the Atlantic. Families celebrated their background, ancestors, and offspring in highly detailed birth and baptismal certificates, marriage confirmations, bookplates, house blessings, and genealogies. Donald A. Shelley, an authority on Pennsylvania German folk art, once estimated that between eight and ten thousand such documents were created.

It was not just a matter of records being meticulously kept. Unstinting artistry was lavished on their embellishment. These hand-drawn and handcolored texts are called fraktur, after the ornate sixteenth-century Gothic alphabet that most illuminators employed. A typical fraktur combines words and images: an inscription containing several sizes of decorative letters is surrounded by drawings of people, plants, and animals that are themselves framed by abstract geometric patterns.

The elaborate fraktur seen on the opposite page is a Vorschrift , or writing sample. It was drawn in 1801 by Georg Geistweit, a circuit minister and schoolmaster active in central Pennsylvania. By and large, the early practitioners of fraktur were ministers and teachers, because they were the only ones in these farming communities with the necessary writing skills. The specimen seen here instructs students in virtuous conduct. The text, taken from the Thirty-fourth Psalm, reads: “I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth. My soul makes its boast in the Lord; let the afflicted hear and be glad. O magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together. I sought the Lord, and he answered me, and delivered me from all my fears. Keep your tongue from evil, and your lips from speaking deceit. Depart from evil, and do eood.”

Schoolmasters often presented a writing sample as a going-away gift, a further reminder to be good after the term ended. (This fraktur was awarded to one Henry Bower in February 1802.) While Georg Geistweit excelled at lettering, he was also