Four months after a burglary saw Chaska's oldest church lose more than 100 years of irreplaceable handwritten records, the crime is unsolved.

But the pastor of Chaska Moravian Church says he's been moved by ongoing public interest in the case and a recent gesture that has helped replace some stolen documents.

"People will say, 'We have prayed for you at our church,' " said the Rev. Michael Eder.

The burglars were likely after cash when they took the bulky safe that also contained handwritten records of births, deaths, marriages and baptisms. Church records starting at 1858 are at the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, Pa. The missing leatherbound volumes had records starting about 1900.

Eder took the unusual step of posting the safe's combination on the church's Facebook page, hoping the thieves would take the petty cash and let someone discover and return the volumes. An anonymous donor offered a $1,000 reward.

But the church and Chaska Police Department have gotten no solid leads. "Part of me still hopes somebody will walk in and hand them to us and say they found them in a ditch," Eder said.

One small consolation came early this month. The church was a polling place, and a voter saw the sign about the burglary on the front door and reminded church staff she had once briefly borrowed the volumes to pursue her genealogy hobby.

"Unbeknown to us, she had photographed every page of the death records. A few days later she came back and gave our receptionist a disk with photos of those pages," he said.

The unexpected gift, which covers death records up to 2009, was "huge," Eder said. "That's the thing that people call for the most."

Still, he says it isn't the same as having the handwritten volumes — one had a note from a pastor in the early 1900s asking all future pastors to visit the graves of his two young children who had died from diphtheria.

"To have the data is one thing, to see it in his script and think what was on his heart and mind — that's pretty irreplaceable."

Susan Feyder • 612-673-1723