Copulation Register

Sometimes you come across something that just stops you in your tracks - this was one of those occasions.  Trawling slowly through an LDS film of German Church Registers trying to "recognise" the family name in lengthy hand-written entries, I was automatically winding forward to the next page when I stopped and said to myself ... "what did I just read on the top of that last page?"

My eyes hadn't deceived me - it said "Copulation Register".  I'll confess that I had never come across that term in this context so I tried to find references or meanings.  I'd almost given up before I looked in Following the Paper Trail: a multilingual translation guide [a terrific book in the GSV library] and there was the ONLY reference I've found so far to a Copulation Register.

Copulation - "marriage, wedding" (from the Latin word copulatio, a coupling or coming together; only later did copulation come to have a rather more specific meaning).
 

And those words are a direct quote from the book.

It definitely stopped me in my tracks and it proves the age-old saying ... "you learn something new every day"!