As we carefully combed through the fragile yellowed pages of the parish registers of the Lutheran community of Picada Café (founded in 1851), we were dumbfounded by the high number of recorded child deaths in this frontier settlement, part of the German Colony of São Leopoldo in the Province of Rio Grande do Sul. A death on October 10, 1855, was particularly striking: the infant Elisabeth Dahmer, daughter of Carl Dahmer and Anna Maria Möbus, had been buried “unbaptized for she lived only three hours.” Not the local lay pastor August Sintz, but “women from the neighborhood” had buried little Elisabeth in the communal cemetery next to the house of worship. Earlier that year, the same young couple had buried their firstborn, Catharina Philippine, another infant fatality. We wondered how widespread child mortality was in this rural region, how peasant families dealt with disease and the menace of death, and how they grieved and lived on. Struck by this community’s conscientious recordkeeping, we embarked on a systematic study of mortality and morbidity in the nineteenth century German settlements that entered history as Brazil’s first post-Independence large-scale immigrant colonization experiment.¹

In this essay, we present the realities of child and adult death among Lutheran communities in the northern settlements of São Leopoldo Colony between 1850-1880 (with a focus on Sapiranga, Campo Bom, Dois Irmãos, São José do Hortêncio, Picada 48, and Picada Café)² ( Hillebrand, 1924 ). We also discuss how death and morbidity affected people’s everyday lives, survival strategies, and health-seeking and religious practices.³

Figure 1:

Historical demographers have shown that a sustained decrease in infant and child mortality was a major contributor to the overall decline in Western Europe’s mortality rates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, playing a key role in the increase of average life expectancy and subsequent demographic regime shifts ( Vögele, Woelk, 2002 , p.587; Mühlichen, Scholz, Doblhammer, 2015 ). The debate over a causal relationship between economic prosperity and infant mortality levels, however, is far from settled. A growing number of scholars suggest that “a vast number of interrelated factors” ( Edvinsson, Gardarsdóttir, Thorvaldsen, 2008 , p.457) shape the survival chances of infants, and that numerous features (such as geography, social class, ethnicity, literacy, religion, customs) make it difficult “to explain differences between countries and regions” (Glavatskaya, Borovik, Thorvaldsen, 2017, p.2). Infant and child mortality and maternal deaths are important indicators of social and economic conditions at both regional and countrywide levels ( Fogel, 1994 ; Glavatskaya et al., 2017 ). While they speak to the local availability and quality of health care, they also shed light on the nature of social inequalities, including gender bias and racial disparities ( Sen, 1998 ).

These debates over the environmental, social and structural determinants of mortality and the heterogeneity of life prospects inform our foray into the largely understudied subject of mortality in the nineteenth-century Brazilian countryside. In what follows, we present our initial findings (with a special focus on infant mortality and maternal death) and reflect on patterns and differences at local and regional levels. Our investigation is based on a source still little known to Brazilian historiography: the parish registers – Gemeindebücher , “community books” (or livros antigos da igreja , old church books, in today’s parlance) – of Lutheran congregations.

Social historians and historical demographers have called for sustained engagements with Brazilian Catholic parish registers. Given the absence of official population-wide censuses for most of the nineteenth century and the disappearance of notary records, these registers are rich resources for the characterization of local worlds and our understanding of regional diversities in the country. According to João Fragoso (2014) , the seriality and sheer volume of parish registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials allow scholars of Catholic societies to meticulously document family alliances, patronage networks, and the influx of slaves and immigrants, along with people’s patterns of residence and mobility. Ana Silvia Volpi Scott (2012) has championed the use of Catholic parish registers to identify different demographic regimes within the Brazilian population, with a focus on fertility patterns and the reality of social endogamy among both emigrant communities in Portugal and immigrant communities in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Sergio Nadalin (1974 ; 2014 ), in turn, has pioneered the study of non-Catholic parish registers, analyzing naming practices as markers of ethnic identity of Lutheran communities in Paraná.

Hitherto, child mortality has received little attention in populational studies of eighteenth and nineteenth century Brazil. Historians and demographers link this dearth of studies to the absence of census data and time series for these periods. They also allude to the general imprecision of age registries and to the underreporting of child deaths in the Catholic parish registers which have become the default source for the few studies available ( Burmester, 1986 , p.296-306; Costa, 1976 ; Campos, 2011 ). In contrast, the Lutheran parish registers that we use in our study reveal a more rigorous mode of recordkeeping. For these small communities, vital registries were integral to social belonging and status. At times, parishioners even used them as para-legal evidence in claims over inheritance. Unlike the Catholic populations of the interior of the country, which for the most part did not have a clergyman in residence and received only sporadic pastoral assistance (Pereira das Neves, 2009 ), each set of Lutheran communities had its own pastor in charge of services and recordkeeping ( Hunsche, 1983 ; Witt, 2015 ). And, as we found in our study, even in the eventual absence of a pastor, community members (such as schoolmasters) had access to the Gemeindebuch to register a person’s death and burial. In most of the parish registers studied, we also noticed that the person’s age at death was by and large recorded fairly accurately (in days, months, and years). This was most likely a tradition early immigrants brought from Germany where, given the absence of a civil registry, Lutheran records were of an official nature.⁴ The consistent and precise patterns of Lutheran recordkeeping thus leave us with a fairly representative picture of vital events in these frontier settlements.

There is a general lack of official data on the population of this rural region, and the results of the first Brazilian census of 1872 for São Leopoldo are problematic to say the least ( Paiva et al., 2012 ). A close scrutiny of the census results reveals deep and glaring flaws: in the majority-Protestant settlement of Dois Irmãos, for example, all residents were considered “Catholic” ( Hillebrand, 1924 ; Mugge, 2012 , p.142-143). Given this lacuna, the Lutheran parish registers serve as a key source for understanding the demographic regimes of this proto-statistical settler population (from people’s patterns of fertility and mortality to patterns of social endogamy and internal migration) ( Nadalin, 1974 ; 2014 ; 2012). These registries occasionally also included significant qualitative information, such as presumed causes of death, burial practices, and moral judgements (from references to virginity and alcoholism to good neighborliness) ( Blume, 2015 ). Mostly initiated by the settlers themselves, the Lutheran communal records can thus also be seen as “anthologies of existences” of sorts ( Foucault, 2000 , p.155), through which we can get glimpses of people’s systems of reference and of “the true harshness of reality” they faced ( Farge, 2013 , p.86).

The majority of the German-Brazilian scholarship has critically explored the development and social life of the São Leopoldo colonial headquarters and its more affluent surrounding settlements ( Roche, 1969 ; Amado, 1978 ; Tramontini, 2000 ). By juxtaposing community sources from old satellite settlements (Campo Bom, Dois Irmãos, and Hortêncio, populated in the 1820s and 1830s) with new peripheral sites (Picada 48, Picada Café, and Sapiranga, populated in the 1840s and 1850s), our mortality and morbidity study thus also provides a more diverse characterization of the German-Brazilian population of the time, with an eye towards biosocial realities and cultural practices.

The northern settlements of the São Leopoldo Colony are also of particular historical significance because of the therapeutic and charismatic movement known as Mucker (literally, those who dig muck: who are false saints, sanctimonious and hypocritical), which originated in Sapiranga. Most of the families who made up the movement and who gathered around the trances and scriptural readings of Jacobina Mentz and the herbal medicines prepared by her husband João Jorge Maurer lived in this northern region and were members of Lutheran communities ( Amado, 1978 , p.135; Biehl, 1996a ; Dreher, 2017 ). In the summer of 1874, after a year of intense intra-ethnic conflict in the region, approximately one hundred settlers were hunted down and killed by armed neighbors and the Brazilian National Army ( Petry, 1957 ; Domingues, 1977 ; Biehl, 1999 ; Dickie, 1996 ). We suspected that the specter of death would be a powerful actor in this context – a driving force leading a growing number of people to the Maurers’ in search of healing and care – and decided to probe this hypothesis in our systematic analysis of mortality patterns and explorations of causes of death in the peripheral Sapiranga and other northern settlements.

Figure 2:

The Colony of São Leopoldo was founded in 1824, as the result of an imperial project to secure the contested borderlands and promote farming based on free labor ( Roche, 1969 ; Hunsche, 1975 ; Seyferth, 1982 ; Witt, 2015 ). This colonial experiment was put on hold during the bloody secessionist Farroupilha civil war (1835-1845), and immigration to the Province resumed immediately thereafter ( Tramontini, 2000 ). In the following years, São Leopoldo experienced fast economic growth and territorial expansion following the arrival of a new wave of German immigrants, intense internal migration and land speculation ( Amado, 1978 ). While in 1845, the larger São Leopoldo colonial region had 7,142 German-Brazilian inhabitants, by 1857 there were some 12,500 settlers living there – a 75% population increase in little over a decade ( Amado, 1978 , p.65; Mugge, 2012 , p.60-63). The number of enslaved people also increased over the years. In 1858, a local census reported the presence of 1,804 captives, making up about 10% of the total estimated population ( Moreira, Mugge, 2014 ).

Numerous Catholic churches and Lutheran houses of worship were built throughout the colonial region during this period ( Amado, 1978 , p.110; Hunsche, 1983 ). Although the Roman Catholic Apostolic Religion remained the official religion of the independent Brazilian empire, and was in charge of all civil registries in the country, other religions were allowed to hold “domestic or private worship in houses designed for this, which do not have the exterior form of a temple” (Brasil, 25 mar. 1824) According to the annual report of the President of the Province João Lins Sinimbu, by 1854, São Leopoldo already had “twenty-one churches in the territory, nine of the Catholic creed and twelve Protestant.”⁵ While the Provincial government paid for a very limited number of ordained Lutheran pastors to work in the colonial headquarters of São Leopoldo and the nearby settlements of Hamburgo Velho and Campo Bom, the newer communities elected their own lay ministers, many of whom were educated farmers and schoolmasters ( Hunsche, 1983 ). The first German Jesuit missionaries arrived in the region in the late 1840s, followed by the German Lutheran missionaries in the mid-1860s ( Biehl, 1996b ; Dreher, 1984 ).⁶

We visited six Lutheran congregations in the São Leopoldo colonial region as well as the main archive of the Brazilian Lutheran Church (IECLB). The Gemeindebücher are stored in the offices or pastoral homes of these local parishes. We photographed the books in order to carry out this study. We were unable to locate the original book from São José do Hortêncio, but had access to a transcribed copy.⁷

Figure 3:

These precious grassroots historical records have been preserved to various degrees. Most are kept in overcrowded cabinets, without any special preservation efforts, just one among dozens of other parish registers and accounting books. While analyzing these old church books, we noticed signs of mishandling, such as signposting on the margins, in addition to the wear and tear that comes with their handling by non-specialists, especially families eager to trace their genealogies (as several local church administrators told us).

The opening pages of these Lutheran registers provide a wide array of information about the history these communities: bylaws, names of founding members and councilmen, lists of donors and donations for the construction of the Bethaus (literally, house of prayer). These independent communities shared ideas, practices and information among themselves, and also mimetically assimilated the knowhow from older congregations, such as São Leopoldo, Hamburgo Velho, and Campo Bom. There was no centralized religious institution unifying these religious communities.

Although congregations experienced pastoral rotation, the shifts were not formally noted in the registers and can only be identified by changes in handwriting. Consider the congregation of Picada 48, which was founded in 1850 by the lay pastor Christian August Sintz, who worked there until 1859. Upon his passing, the congregation was guided by the lay pastor João Jorge Klein, later associated with the Mucker ( Petry, 1957 ; Domingues, 1977 ), who had himself founded the congregation of Sapiranga the year before. In 1864, Klein was replaced by Johannes Stanger, one of the many ordained German pastors who would, in the coming decades, transform the colonies into a new missionary frontier ( Biehl, 1996a ; Wachholz, 2003 ; Hunsche, 1983 ). The parish registers are a rare material reminder of the self-governance, adaptability, and late “germanization” of these largely illiterate (or semi-literate) communities.⁸

The main purpose of the Gemeindebuch was to record the life events of families in the community: birth/baptism, youth confirmation, marriage, and death/burial. Local pastors wrote the entries in Gothic German, based on information retrieved from parishioners and their kin (including a child’s godparents, “compadres” and “comadres”). The actual registration did not always follow a systematic pattern. In some books, all events are listed chronologically, while in others, they are listed under categories (baptisms, marriages etc.). We noticed a concern with completeness in recordkeeping, as pastors often inscribed events retroactively (especially when they were unable to perform the rituals themselves) with the aid of other literate community members.

The first German immigrants recorded baptisms, marriages, and deaths during their transatlantic journey to the new world. This registry became the first “church book” of the São Leopoldo Lutheran community. In the majority of German territories, there was no civil registration, and congregations were therefore in charge of the work of recordkeeping ( Lee, Marschalk, 2002 ). In Brazil, immigrants would continue this form of community recordkeeping. In 1848, when the lay pastor Christian Sintz started the Picada 48 parish register, he even named it the book of Zivilstand (civil status). This customary practice affirmed people’s religious identity and communal belonging, while also carrying potential legal value.

Lutheran communities also copied the registration practices of Brazil’s official religion. Extending Portuguese colonial practices, each Catholic parish had to keep a registry of its members. Priests had to follow specific norms of registration: this system had been defined and standardized by the First Constitutions of the Bahian Archbishopric (1707), which aimed to discipline religious life. According to the Constitutions, slaves also had the right to the Christian sacraments and the masters, as “good Catholics,” were supposed to baptize them ( Torres-Londoño, 2006 ).

In spite of its political force, the Catholic church had a precarious institutionality throughout the territory (Pereira das Neves, 2009 ). Registration norms were commonly reconfigured and locally adapted. In the first “book of deaths” of the São Leopoldo Colony’s Catholic congregation (1827-1878), for example, we can see that the priests tended to follow the canonical model ( Vide, 1853 , p.292), mentioning the name and age of the deceased and whether he or she received, as required, the last sacramental rites. However, many priests also added presumed causes of death, something that was not mandated. This local adaptation can also be found in the Lutheran parish registers, thus providing scholars with important data on vernacular diagnostic cultures (see also Scott, Scott, Bassanezzi, 2014 ).

Like the Catholics, Lutherans also recorded the baptisms of slaves. These surprising records reveal how widespread enslaved labor was in the German settlements, even though a Provincial law from 1850 had prohibited immigrants from owning slaves ( Moreira, Mugge, 2014 , p.17). The Lutheran parish register of Hamburgo Velho lists the baptisms of fifty-one enslaved children between 1846 and 1871 (when the “Law of the Free Womb” granted freedom to all children born to slaves, see: Chalhoub, 2011 ): all children received the surname of their masters, unlike in Catholic practice ( Woortman, 1995 ).

Compared to Catholics, Lutheran free children were given more godparents. While Catholic communities, following the Constitutions, tended to name only one godfather and one godmother for each child, in the Lutheran church books we noticed a significant increase over time in the number of godparents named (from one pair to three pairs). This practice could reflect original German traditions of newly arrived immigrants ( Alfani, Gourdon, 2012 ) or the strategies of families to expand their social networks ( Mugge, 2012 ).

After an initial visit to local Lutheran parishes and our examination of their “old church books,” we developed a study of mortality and morbidity. We examined the registers of Sapiranga (1858-1880) (transcribed and translated by the local genealogist Ernani Haag), and of Campo Bom (1850-1880), Dois Irmãos (1850-1880), Hortêncio (1858-1880), Picada 48 (1850-1880), and Picada Café (1851-1880)⁹ – all transcribed and organized by the local genealogist Gaspar Stemmer and his research team.¹⁰ We studied all these registers in PDF format along with the photographed originals. Before proceeding with our data entry, we systematically crosschecked registries and found the transcriptions and translations of the originals to be largely accurate. We extracted all available information on births/baptisms ( Getaufen ) and deaths/burials ( Beerdigungen ), standardized all German names into Portuguese (to facilitate complex analysis, Bauer, 2016 ), and created our own databank using MS Excel. In addition, we collected qualitative data on presumed causa mortis when recorded in the death/funeral entries.

A precarious living environment, suffused with both fertility and untimely death: this is the picture that emerges from our analysis of Lutheran parish registers of the northern settlements of the Colony of São Leopoldo (1850-1880). Rampant child and maternal death assailed this frontier zone, and everyday life was punctuated by infections and accidents, along with epidemic outbreaks (e.g. cholera and smallpox) and war (international and civil conflict). The menace of death haunted households in these remote yet interconnected German-Brazilian farming communities. Strikingly, we found that 68.1% of the deceased in this micro-region (501 of a total number of 903) were infants, children, and young adults (i.e., seven out of ten deaths). Our findings also show that in this context, child death extended far beyond the neonatal period and the first year of life. Between 1850 and 1880, more than half (53.1%) of all deaths recorded were of infants and children (0-14 years).

As an analytical exercise, we compared the infant mortality rates found in our micro-region with the limited studies on infant mortality in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Brazil ( Santos, 2013 , p.68; Campos, 2011 , p.222-224). The highest rate of 135 per 1000 live births, found in the settlement of Sapiranga, is close to the rate of 114 per 1,000 live births found in the village of Curitiba (1785-1798) ( Burmester, 1986 , p.295-308), and significantly lower than the rate of 240 found in Vila Rica, Province of Minas Gerais (1799-1801) ( Costa, 1976 , p.241-262). The colonies’ infant mortality rates were significantly lower than those found in the capital of Rio de Janeiro at a time when, according to historian Maria Luiza Marcílio, a true “genocide of children” was taking place: 206 in 1864, 578 in 1873, and 645 in 1875 (per 1,000 live births) ( Marcílio, 2017 , p.107).

We expanded this exercise to demographic studies of infant mortality in mid-19th century Germany. The rates in rural and pre-industrial regions, where the majority of immigrants originated, were much lower than the rates in large cities, which recorded infant mortality rates between 150 and 380 per 1000 live births ( Lee, Marschalck, 2002 , p.558). Scholars credit these lower rates (which resemble that of Sapiranga during 1860-1864) to the frequency and duration of breastfeeding (related to women’s domestic, agricultural forms of work) as well as to relatively better sanitary conditions and access to food ( Mühlichen, Scholz, Doblhammer, 2015 , p.194-195). This could also be said about our southern Brazilian micro-region when compared to the insalubrious reality of the imperial capital Rio de Janeiro.

The omnipresence of premature death must have been intensely felt across households and neighborhoods in these German-Brazilian rural communities, reshaping people’s ideas of wellbeing and their memorialization practices ( Blume, 2015 ).¹² One can only imagine the devastating emotional toll and adverse long term economic effects of an undeterred increase in infant mortality, and how, in order to ward off early death, each new family had to develop, with the aid of elders and neighbors, their own kind of home-based care, to be supplemented by the medicine of local healers.

In analyzing the evolution of child mortality in all six Lutheran communities, we noted a significant spike in the quinquennial 1870-1874. Intriguingly, this peak coincides with the central dates of the religious-therapeutic movement of the Mucker. Starting in 1868, people from all over the northern colonies flocked to the home of Jacobina Mentz and João Jorge Maurer, located at the foothills of the Ferrabrás Mountain in Sapiranga, in search of therapies for themselves and their families ( Amado, 1978 ; Biehl, 2008 ). Had we come across a plausible correlation between the considerable increase in infant mortality and the growing pilgrimage to the Maurers’ home in this pre-Mucker conflict period? Might people’s generalized affliction, and a rampant increase in child mortality in particular, have been at the center of the crystallization of a therapeutic-religious space later stigmatized and hunted down as Mucker quackery?

Figure 4:

Contrary to general mortality trends in this region, more women of reproductive age died than men in military age (15-39 years). This was largely due to maternal death: 37.5% of women of reproductive age died due to childbirth-related complications. This reality must have devastated families, influenced child mortality, and significantly affected the mindful bodies of younger women. We also found a surprisingly high number of young single women (14 out of 72 registries), without references to causes of death, like the fifteen-year-old enslaved Eva from Dois Irmãos. Facing the limits of available evidence, we can only wonder as to how and why these young women’s lives ended so prematurely. Were these also cases of young maternal deaths and stillbirths? Or perhaps of a final agency in withdrawing from captivity and unbearably violent domestic worlds?

Men of military age died of various causes, ranging from infectious diseases to work-related accidents or war-related injuries. During the Paraguayan war (1864-1870), hundreds of young men from the São Leopoldo colonies were recruited and sent to the front ( Mugge, 2012 ). The parish registers we studied occasionally reported on the German-Brazilian war casualties ( Becker, 1968 ). Families held memorial services in the absence of the bodies of their departed loved ones.¹³

We found references to possible causa mortis in less than half (46.1%) of the parish registers analyzed. Most people died without a precise medical diagnosis. The existing references were most likely based on information retrieved from grieving families or neighbors and by and large allude to symptoms. The most commonly cited cause of death is Krämpfe (“convulsions”), suggesting a scenario in which families witnessed febrile seizures before the passing of a loved one. These references are a rich resource for future studies on the dissemination of medical categories and treatments in this Southern countryside and on vernacular classificatory systems.

A comparison between the mortality patterns found in our rural region and more urbanized areas is in order. As a next step in our overall research project, we plan to analyze the records of births/baptisms and deaths/funerals in the Lutheran communities of São Leopoldo, Hamburgo Velho, and the provincial capital Porto Alegre. We want to test hypotheses about rural-urban disparities in infant mortality rates, as suggested by scholarship on nineteenth-century Europe, where urban settings had higher rates due to maternal work outside the home, decreased frequency of breastfeeding, and circulation of endemic diseases and epidemics, despite greater access to public health measures by the State ( Laux, 1989 ; Gehrmann, 2011 ). A comparison of mortality patterns between the Lutheran populations we studied and their Catholic neighbors is also in order. Such a study could investigate whether denominational belonging might have distinctly impacted reproduction and mortality patterns, as argued by a growing number of demographers and historians working in nineteenth-century Europe ( Mühlichen, Scholz, Doblhammer, 2015 ).

Historical anthropologists, historians, and demographers can indeed join efforts in identifying and exploring the potentials of hitherto insufficiently studied communal archival sources. While unearthing grassroots archives, our collaborative efforts enlarge our knowledge of the environmental and social determinants of life chances in frontier zones, while also illuminating people’s arts of living and healing.

Figure 5: