PROOF OF BAPTISM

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXX, Issue 4810, 18 February 1936, Page 8

PROOF OF BAPTISM

GERMAN WIFE'S QUEST. MATTER OF LIFE OR DEATH. On "a matter of life and death," ministers of the Aberdeen Presbytery of -the Church of Scotland have been asked to search their registers for trace of a woman's baptism. The Scottish wife of a German officer has written from Germany to the Rev. A. R. Taylor, clerk of the Aberdeen Presbytery, seeking proof of the Christian baptism of her mother, Ann Massie. Daughter of a brush-worker, the mother was born in 1852, probably in Aberdeen or the neighbouring village of Dyce.

The daughter, who was taken to Germany at the age of two, declares: "It is a matter of life and death for my children." This application, one of many similar ones, throws a searchlight on the ever-increasing persecution in Germany of "non-Aryan" families. For months applications from Englishwomen married to Germans have been pouring into Somerset House. These women are desperately try-, ing to prove that they are not of Jewish descent. If they fail to do so, they and their families are deprived of■ the full rights of German citizenship. "We can do very little to help them," said a Somerset House official to the Daily Herald. "All we can do is to supply copies of the birth certificates for which they ask. "To prove descent it is often necessary for applicants to go back three, four and more generations, and as the records are. not, of course, kept 'in familes,' it is impossible to do anything unless we are given the fujl names and dates and places of births of the fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, greatgrandfathers and great-grandmothers, and so on. "Very few families are able io provide these details.