The St. Laurentius Church in Kating is one of the many village churches that characterise the landscape and townscape of the Eiderstedt peninsula (Lower Saxony, Germany). The oldest part of the church dates back to the Romanesque period. The roof is a traditional timber rafter roof with a queen post construction that was probably added in a successive construction phase. Numerous extensions in the construction characterise the timber roof's current appearance. In 2024, the church was renovated as part of the programme ‘Preservation of the Eiderstedt Church Landscape’. A detailed analysis of the roof construction was carried out focusing on the role of historical carpentry connections - halved lap, dovetailed lap, double tenon and skewed tenon joints - in the construction, with the aim of improving the accuracy of the numerical model by varying the stiffness of the connections in the FEM model. First, the paper describes the construction history of the roof from both a historical and a static point of view. Then, the behaviour of the original load-bearing structure and the change in behaviour due to the addition are shown. Finally, the influence of the model connection stiffness on the load-bearing and on the deformation behaviour is presented.