Amish Folk Artist Barbara Ebersol: Her Life, Fraktur, and Death Record Book

Lancaster, Pennsylvania: Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society, 1995. Hardcover. VG (Has name of former owner on first page, otherwise clean.). Green cloth, gilt letters on spine & front cover, green & yellow & color illus. dust jacket, 111 pp., color & BW illus. "The work of Barbara Ebersol (1846-1922), an Amish artist of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, documents the existence of both a tradition of artistic expression and a well-developed folk-art heritage among the Old Order Amish. She produced bookplates, bookmarks, tokens of remembrance, watercolor paintings, and needlework with motifs adapted from the embroidery tradition and from nature -- tulips, hearts, stars, peonies, and roses. She also produced a wealth of family records that trace the development of the Lancaster County Amish community and its enlarging field of contacts with settlements in Ontario and other states. As families grew, she hand-catalogued in their Bibles the marriages, births, and deaths that comprised the history of her people. This task perhaps motivated her as a witness to the flowering of the local Amish community to create a family record which she later expanded into 730 entries, the most comprehensive Amish death record book known." (dj) The entries from the entire death record appear here, along with many illustrations of Ebersol's work. A lovely book.