Google Translate is the most popular language translation tool on the Internet.
German genealogy and finding your way around German genealogy Internet resources can seem mighty simple to some people. I’m reminded of the time at a national conference when two women came up to the German Life magazine exhibit booth while notable (and now, unfortunately, late) Germanic genealogy scholar John T. Humphrey was present. The women apparently recognized neither John nor me and just started talking to each other about “how simple” German genealogy is. “All I did was write to the pastor and he sent me everything!” one babbled to the other. John and I looked at each other after they left, and he uttered, “So what have I spent the last half of my life doing German genealogy for? All I needed to do was write to the pastor.”
Here’s your tip of all tips: Yes, lightning can strike and you may get lucky. And as I said, many, many German genealogy resources are available to you. But to find them effectively and analyze them well takes some skill and likely more effort than just writing a letter to get “everything.” What you need are ways to get around language barriers, some knowledge of political divisions and church groups, and some schooling about collaborative family trees. This chapter will give you all that and more, including a preview of the step-by-step tools you’ll see in the rest of the book as well as an honest look at what you can and can’t achieve on the Internet.
In terms of language and the language skills needed to use them effectively, websites for German genealogy will essentially fit into one of three categories:
When combined with the fact that many of the records you will be accessing are handwritten or printed in the German language, this potential linguistic roadblock is a call for a skills intervention—improving your German language skills or your skill at finding resources to help translate for you. You’ll also need some knowledge of German phonetics and dialect, but we’ll go over how to further arm yourself with those in chapter 3. For now, we’re dealing with what to do when you’re confronted with having to translate a German website.
As the makeup and functionality of the Internet has morphed and played a larger role in everyday life, looking for exactly what you want on the Web spawned the need for a search engine to separate the wheat from the chaff of the world’s virtually assembled knowledge. Enter Google <www.google.com>, the greatest search engine known to man.
Merely searching for keywords on Google is valuable for anyone, including genealogists, but there’s much more than that on the site. German genealogists can use Google for translations in two separate ways. First, Google’s Translate feature <translate.google.com> lets you take a word, phrase, or passage and have it translated, quite roughly, from German to English (or between any of the hundreds of languages available).
Image A. shows the screen you’ll use to initiate translation. You may have to play with the click-on boxes below the word Translate, including one marked Detect language to switch the default language fields to what you wish.
When a German website has an easy-to-click button for an English-language version, be sure to give a visual double-check on whether the English version is a translation of the German site or a just a summary. If the latter, you may want to do your own translation using the step-by-step instructions in this chapter.
Another way you can use Google’s translation features is to help you with that second category of German-language websites that does not supply an English-language version.
Google Translate is the most popular language translation tool on the Internet.
As noted, Google Translate gives translations that are rough at times and fail to account for many contexts. Here are some other translation websites to consider as alternates and supplements (with assessments in part based on information from professional genealogist and linguist Glen W. Covert):
As genealogists we’re forever dealing with the archaic. That’s the job description, after all: to trace the human form of antiques! For that reason, it sometimes helps to have a dictionary of archaic words. The best one of these that’s been put online is Grimms’ Deutsches Wörterbuch (German Dictionary) <www.woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB>—and yes, it’s compiled by the same Brothers Grimm who gave us the collections of fairy tales. Because this is a work in the German language, you’ll need to employ other translation tools, but the payoff is that many words no longer in use (but that show up in historic documents) will show up in Grimms’.
At the bottom of the Wörterbuchnetz home page <www.woerterbuchnetz.de> (image B.), you’ll find a number of additional old dictionaries and reference books on the University of Trier’s website. These range from dialect dictionaries to Middle High German reference guides to a German law dictionary.
The University of Trier’s website contains references that can help you decode German words that are no longer in use.
We’ve been concentrating on using websites that do the heavy lifting for you, but as you saw with the old Grimms’ dictionary, not all tools are going to spoon-feed you what you need to know. The following apps, podcasts, articles, courses, and sites are designed to help you learn more of the German language:
Of course, even if you have the most fluent German language skills, German genealogy records can throw you a few more curveballs—here comes that archaic thing again! Before the 1940s, most printed German records used a Fraktur font, and handwritten documents were composed in cursive scripts that may well appear to be chicken scratches to the naked eye. If you’re going to make a serious attempt at finding the actual records and understanding them, you’ll need to learn to “cut through the code” of these impediments. Here are a variety of online tools that can help:
Due to agreements between major websites, many German record databases are available in multiple places. Always check free sites first to see if they have what you need—you may discover the same data that pay sites such as Ancestry.com <www.ancestry.com> and MyHeritage <www.myheritage.com> require a subscription to access.
While you don’t need a lot of German to succeed with German Internet research, the more language skills you can develop, the better able you will be to function on your own and with less help from German speakers. This is important because many records in America relating to your German ancestors—including some documents from generations after immigration, depending on the type of community in which your ancestors settled—will still be written in German. The sites listed here should give you some assistance, but as with many computer tools, they’re often not nimble enough to account for dialects and spelling variants. For that, you’ll need some knowledge of German phonetics (coming in chapter 3) to avoid problems such as faulty indexed transcriptions of records.
Putting together collaborative family trees on genealogy websites has moved from being one of the hottest things going just a few years ago to a much-debated paradigm among family historians. There’s no doubt that these “pedigree databases” can produce potential research leads and jackpot moments of discovery. In fact, we’ll discuss the three largest genealogy entities offering user-submitted family tree databases (FamilySearch.org, Ancestry.com, and MyHeritage) in part 2.
But there’s also no doubt that in many cases, the public family trees that people post online are a huge echo chamber of unverified information. Does this mean you shouldn’t use them for clues and forming hypotheses? Absolutely not. But does this mean that we should blithely add the ancestors found on someone’s tree without checking whether the information about those ancestors is supported by evidence? Even more emphatically—absolutely not! Fact-checking and having a level of scrutiny are vital when evaluating others’ family trees for your own research.
You also need to be prepared for a dose of disappointment if you attempt to contact the submitters of public family trees. Collaborative family trees on the major genealogy websites can be set with all manner of privacy levels; for example, fairly typical restrictions protect the information of living persons or limit access to only certain authorized people. And for many people today, genealogy is a passing fad. They put together what I have termed “carpenter trees.” That is, they find one “board,” perhaps a birth record, somewhere on the Internet (probably on some other online tree) and “nail” it along with another “board” (say a marriage record, found somewhere else on the Internet) of a similarly named person. When you ask them to share their sources, often these “carpenter genealogists” either don’t reply at all or respond off point (often by asking you for more information about your family, presumably so they can keep their “nailing” process going). The net result is often finding out that the promising new lead is just another voice bouncing around in that echo chamber.
Still, don’t dismiss these collaborative trees without investigation. You can occasionally make new research acquaintances. You may also find references to actual records that will put you on the right track—especially if it’s a case where an ancestor moved to an unexpected place or did something else that your research methodology wouldn’t have picked up. But remember that even if what you find is a completely unsourced name, date, or place that was previously unknown to you—well, you can formulate new questions or a new hypothesis and set out to find documentation of said name, date, or place. No clue should be shunned.
Finally, these public family trees are not the only source of collaboration. You’ll discover that some German genealogy-themed social media sites are worth your attention. We’ll talk about these in chapter 13.
Be wary when looking at any website with digitized records to decide whether you’ve seen “all” records of a category, for two reasons. First, most records on the Web were produced by microfilm-to-digital transfer, so if an original record page went unmicrofilmed, it will also be an undigitized page. Second, large websites often have databases will all-inclusive titles (think “German Births, 1558–1898”) but are hard to drill down as far as which selected records they actually include.
We’ve now armed you with some methodologies and given you the tools to investigate the three types of websites in terms of language. As we explore the big sites in part 2 and specialty sites in part 3, you’ll see that you might well be able to accomplish your German research goals without darkening the door of a library or archives. This would have been impossible just a few years ago.
But while complete online research is possible today, it’s likely that you will need to go “on the ground” for additional assistance. This is particularly true if your ancestry is from a more “backward” area of Germany, but it can also happen if you need to do special analysis to find the right records.
For example, a genealogist could learn the Rhineland hometown of her ancestor from an American church record but have difficulty finding more information on it solely from the Internet. A series of (printed) books on the boundaries of the church parishes indicates that the hometown would be in a particular parish, which no doubt it was for the time period that the author used. But that was not the time period the genealogist’s ancestor was in the hometown. The researcher then has to map out that entire Rhineland area and actually view several area parishes’ records from the time period to determine which one was the correct hometown for her ancestor, and many towns’ records have still not been digitized.
There will be a day when all these records, maps, and microfilms will be digitized, but that day is not upon us yet. But still, many, many genealogical questions and problems can be solved with the right Internet searches.