History via posters

A few days ago, I received a bunch of old certificates and posters from a friend of mine.  Some of them are quite old: the oldest dating back to 1907!  As you can imagine, it is a pleasure to have such old pieces.  The pieces were apparently rolled up for some time, so I had to weigh the top and bottom of each piece down so that I could take a picture.
The first two pictures are of a First Communion certificate from 1907.  If you look closely, the certificate is in German.  Most people in my neck of the woods are of German descent, including myself.  

 The certificate is pretty rough around the edges (literally), but the colors are still vibrant and the gold embossing shows up nicely.
Here is a close up of the German words.  Pretty cool, eh?  The small picture on the left is an angel staying the hand of Abraham to prevent him from sacrificing Isaac.  On the right looks like a depiction of the early Church during the holy sacrifice of the Mass.

With a few exceptions, the certificates were the only ones that had dates on them.  Figuring out the dates for every one will take some time.  I will have to do some research online using publishers' names.  Hopefully I can find something!

 This Last Supper poster is much smaller in comparison.  The artist's name is Schmidt, a German name if ever there was one. ;)

 
This picture is a copy of a pencil drawing by someone named Athanese, I think.  It was difficult to read the handwriting.

What follows are lithograph posters.  At the moment, I'm assuming that all of them are lithographs, because several of them were labeled as such.

Here we have a classic "Good Shepherd" poster.  

This Nativity scene poster is very beautiful.  

This poster of the children and their guardian angel is one of my favorites.  The colors are so pretty.  

Very true. :)

This is a scene from one of my favorite Bible stories.  It's a relief to know that even St. Peter had problems trusting God. ;)
The sides of the poster look warped.  This is because the poster curves inward from being rolled up.

The solemnest moment of all history: the Crucifixion.

This is another one of my favorites.  The saint pictured is Saint Cecilia playing the organ.  She is the patron saint of music and musicians.  The photo does not do justice to the color quality of the poster.  It is gorgeous. 

This "Good Shepherd" poster was very, ahem, curly.  I also laugh every time I see the sheep of the left of Jesus sticking his tongue out.

"Baa!"

 This last one is probably the worst quality photo I took of the entire set.  Oh well.  There is however a copyright date of 1911.  One hundred years old!

It was fun to play archivist this afternoon.  I'm not sure how I'm going to fix the curled-edge problem.  Ideally, I would frame each and every one of them, but my bedroom only has so much wall space, never mind the rest of the house. ;)