The family register holds a distinctive place in American visual culture. Used to record marriages and offspring within a family through several generations, the family register also incorporates hand-illuminated decorative art. To the Latest Posterity is the first major study to explore the colorful world of Pennsylvania German family registers and their place in American social, religious, and cultural traditions.

Renowned authorities on fraktur, Russell and Corinne Earnest trace the evolution of decorative family registers from their roots in medieval European illuminated...