The earliest records I have seen personally that relate to the Helfers are found in the church books of Aindling. Microfilm copies were available to me in the USA but I have not yet visited the town. Aindling appears to have held the "mother church" for several small villages surrounding it that were presumably too small at the time to support their own church.(See a map.) These localities included Bach, Eisingersdorf, and Binnebach: villages in which I ultimately found Helfers living. However, all the Helfer baptisms before 1664 came from the small village of Bach which is walking distance north of Todtenweis. Bach is clearly the ancestral homeland of the Helfers in the first half of the 17th Century. Although there were a handful of sacramental records of people from Todtenweis or Sand in the Aindling church books, Todtenweis had its own church.
The early 1600s must have been a time of great turmoil in the region due to the 30 Years War during which Augsburg was besieged and captured. The war ended formally in 1648. This war was noteworthy for great loss of life and destruction of property during the war itself and from the disease and starvation that followed. Church and other records were destroyed. Something bad happened in Bach. There is evidence of this in the records themselves. Baptisms from Bach fall to almost none after 1665 and several Helfer baptisms of children who survived to marry cannot be found in the Aindling records.
These earliest records are difficult for me because of their physical age, the quality of the microfilm, their entry in Latin, and the wide variety of different hands writing them. For over eight hours I looked at every individual baptism in Aindling between 1626 and 1683. I found 18 Helfer baptisms, all of which were from Bach. I also looked at all Aindling marriages between 1626 and 1799 and found 21, By the 1700s, the Helfers were beginning to spread out to the surrounding villages. In addition to the above, I found a few records of other families in which a Helfer was listed only as a parent, godparent or witness. These were harder to spot and I am sure I missed some. It is also likely that I missed some marriages in which the Helfer was a female, although I did find a handful.
Of the 13 Helfer baptisms before 1652 (a transition point for the church books) 8 were from my 8G Grandparents Johann and Maria between 1628 and 1644. Another two early baptisms in 1629 and 1630 were of children of Michael and Anna, and the last two in 1650 and 1652 were children of Georg and Apollonia. I am assuming that the latter two couples from Bach are related, but I do not know how they fit into the family. One child, Eva, born in 1631, appears not to have her parents names listed but I made the most likely assignment. I will display the information for these unknown relationships separately.
Some records or pages were not interpretable due to smeared ink, stains, poor quality of the microfilm image, or other reasons. The town of origin was often not written in the margin requiring especially careful review. All parts of a date were not always entered requiring reference to surrounding items. Sometimes the dates were difficult for me to identify and I have been only as specific as I thought justified by the quality of the record and my confidence in my translation.
A big problem for me still is that the records are in Latin. I was just getting comfortable with the old German-language records! In one way, the handwriting is easier to read because it is (what else) Latin from which modern American English script derives. On the other hand, I was able to skip Latin in high school! Names are given in their Latin form in which suffixes seem to be important. (Why does there seem to be an 'm' after some first names?) Additionally the abbreviations, and various gender- case- and tense- related suffixes and prefixes make me less confident of my understanding. I have not yet found the translation resources that help me with my German. I am placing copies of all the original records on this site together with my basic understanding of what they say. If you have additions or corrections, please contact me. If you are aware of any other Helfer descendants whose distant ancestors were from Bach or other villages, please also let me know.