Geburtschein (Birth Certificate)

Translation:
To these two spouses known as Jacob Klein and his wedded housewife, a born Heiligin is a son born to this world.  The name is Johannes Klein in the year of our Lord Jesus 1785 the 14th day of December at [blank] in the sign of [blank].  This Johannes is born and baptized in America in the State of Pennsylvania, Bucks County, Lower Milford Township and his sponsors are Johannes Klein and his wife Anna Maria.

Although he was a schoolmaster who lived primarily in Dauphin County with his wife Anna Maria Dorothea, Krebs’ fraktur-making activities cover a wide geographic area throughout much of southeastern Pennsylvania and a large number of his fraktur, both hand-drawn and printed, survive.  In this example of his work, the sun faces encircled with pointed rays and outlined with wrigglework borders ranged along across the top and bottom are characteristic and particularly expressive, appearing almost as caricatures, and illustrative of the love of fantasy and light-hearted imagery that can be discerned in many of Krebs’ imaginative interpretations. 

The patterned, ordered geometric composition is executed in a loose fashion around a rectangular text, a format Krebs employed prior to c. 1790.  The two brightly colored and simple but well-defined parrots depicted in a linear profile, also typical of Krebs’ style, may have been influenced by woodcut designs by artists such as Heinrich Otto.  On this fraktur, the deep creases suggest that it was folded away for storage.  It is unlikely that any fraktur certificates were originally intended to be framed for display.  They were primarily meant as documents of record.