Paul Joyce’s website guides you through how every German letter can combine with the others and how letters and these combinations are pronounced.
The German language can be tricky for non-native speakers, and it’s easy for words to become lost in translation. This was the case when I was trying to visit an ancestor’s hometown. When I began my genealogical searching some three decades ago, a single, solitary Heimat of my ancestors had been handed down to me: the tiny village of Elsoff in the former Grafschaft (countship) of Wittgenstein, now part of the German Land Nordrhein-Westfalen. As such, making a pilgrimage of sorts to Elsoff became a goal of mine. During my first two trips to Germany, I didn’t have the moxie to go to this region myself. So I queried two friends, the German couple hosting me, about going there, only to be told that it was too far to travel. From merely looking at the map, I knew this wasn’t true. But not wanting to be the stereotypical “ugly American,” I didn’t press the issue.
Finally, I wrote about wanting to visit the town in an e-mail to the couple after my first two visits. Seeing the name in print must have made up for my apparently barbarous German accent, because the hostess told me that when I visited and was speaking about the town, she thought I said Elsass, the German name for Alsace, when I was actually trying to say Elsoff. Alsace, an area that is now part of France but once was an ethnic German area, would have indeed been quite a distance from my hosts’ home an hour north of Frankfurt am Main. I visited Elsoff on my next trip across the Atlantic. No better evidence than this has shown me how easily German names can be verbally garbled.
We’ve already primed you with some terminology, translation helps, and historical background in chapters 1 and 2. In this chapter, we’ll cover tools needed for “ungarbling” the names of your ancestors and the places associated with them so you’ll be ready to tackle the websites profiled in parts 2 and 3. Some of these helpful resources deal with German names and phonetics, while others offer map and gazetteer resources and additional German historical background. The worksheet at the end of this chapter will also be a helpful guide for putting together all possible spelling variants for place and surnames.
A truism of genealogy is that only a foolish person immediately says “But my ancestor’s name wasn’t spelled that way” when confronted with a record that uses a different spelling than the one the researcher is accustomed to. When you add the complexity of the many dialects of German used in Europe and the fact that many American records were created by an English-speaking clerk, enumerator, or tax collector trying to figure out what a semi-literate German-speaking immigrant was trying to tell him—well, that’s a recipe for a smorgasbord of place and surname spellings in the records you’ll find.
The short course in German phonetics—there’s a longer course in chapter 6 of The Family Tree German Genealogy Guide and more details in websites that we’ll profile shortly—is that several consonants frequently are interchangeable. These consonants are the b and p; d and t and th; g and k and c; and (because of pronunciation differences) the German w and the English v. For vowels, the number one source of confusion is that the German language has vowels with Umlaute (umlauts), generally written as a pair of dots over the a, o, u, and y (the last usually appearing only in the Swiss German dialect) that affect the pronunciation of the vowel. The use of umlauts is a shortcut for putting an e after the previous vowel. Another German-language peculiarity is that a “double s” is frequently represented as an “S-zet” (β) that is rendered much like (and therefore frequently mistaken for) a Roman script uppercase B.
Whenever you encounter a new German surname in your genealogy, you should think about that surname not in terms of the spelling but rather as a set of spelling variants, using phonetics to flesh out the universe of possibilities for the name. While given names also involve spelling variants, you’ll likely be able to identify the individuals correctly if you remember the Rufname concept from chapter 1. You must also understand that many German nicknames are used in records but the Germans often chop off the first syllable in forming diminutives—think Stina for “Christina” and Klaus for “Nicklaus.”
The same goes for new place names, especially if you don’t immediately find them on a map (or are unsure whether you’ve indeed found the right town—for example, maybe the area of Germany doesn’t fit other information you have). Use the phonetischen Namen Karte (phonetic name chart) at the end of this chapter to come up with lists of spelling variants so you are attuned to all possibilities when searching databases for records or browsing through documents. Another resource that will be profiled in the chapter on MyHeritage <www.myheritage.com> is the site’s “Global Name Translation.”
For a quick-and-dirty recap of how different letters are pronounced in German, use About.com’s German Language Web page on The German Phonetic Spelling Code <www.german.about.com/library/blfunkabc.htm>. While this is primarily a code used for spelling out letters for use in broadcasts, it gives the basic sounds that will help you with German in general, too.
A much more sophisticated online look at German phonetics is part of the University of Portsmouth in England’s Paul Joyce German Course. Joyce’s A Guide to German Pronunciation <www.joycep.myweb.port.ac.uk/pronounce> (image A.) details what you’ll need to come up with the most likely pronunciations of various German names. Joyce’s guide illustrates pronunciation rules in depth, covering every German letter as well as combinations of letters.
Paul Joyce’s website guides you through how every German letter can combine with the others and how letters and these combinations are pronounced.
In addition to testing out phonetic variants of surnames, some Internet databases allow you to get an idea of where those surnames are found in today’s Germany. While there’s no guarantee that the highest concentrations of a surname in modern Germany will be an exact match of those historical concentrations, these databases do give you a starting point for geographic hypotheses on your family origins if other records have not borne fruit. The data from both the websites profiled below come from German telephone books; in chapter 11, we’ll also show you how to conduct searches for individuals and businesses on a website with the all-Germany telephone directory.
Because many dialects of German existed in Europe, differences in spelling and usage also will appear in records (both foreign and domestic) based on those dialects. For example, a parishioner from Hannover (in northwest Germany) might have given baptismal information to a pastor born in Württemberg (a southwestern German state). Their differences in dialect could have led to transcription errors or spelling variations in records.
Another website is Ken McCrea’s GermanNames <www.germannames.com>, which charges nominal fees for maps and German postal code listings of surnames. A book of the surname maps of the five hundred most frequent surnames is also available from the same author.
The Geogen Surname Mapping site <legacy.stoepel.net> will generate three types of data on surnames:
Next, let’s take a closer look at how the site works.
Because of the many changes to political divisions in German lands, you must always think about the Heimat not only in terms of the “now of now” but also the “now of then”—with “then” possibly referring to multiple time periods. While you’ll learn more about this in chapter 9, a number of websites will help you bridge this gap between today and yesterday, hopefully leaving no town unfound. Some have actual maps; others are gazetteers (essentially, place-name encyclopedias).
Two of best tools are Meyers Gazetteer of the German Empire on Ancestry.com <search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=1074> and the GOV Historic Gazetteer on Genealogy.net <gov.genealogy.net/search/index>), which will both be explored in depth in part 2. Here we’ll discuss some of the smaller resources that can help you unravel German place names and locate them in modern Germany.
As far as historical maps go, none are more detailed or more accessible than the Atlas des Deutschen Reichs (Atlas of the German Kingdom) by Ludwig Ravenstein (1883). This fully searchable map was digitized by the University of Wisconsin and is available for searching at <uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/German/Ravenstein>. Once you find a village in Ravenstein’s atlas, you can compare the area to a modern-day map.
Another noteworthy source of historical maps is The Family Tree Historical Maps Book: Europe (Family Tree Books, 2015), which has an index to the online source for each of the maps contained in the work, allowing readers to blow up each map to any size they wish. You can learn more about this resource at <www.shopfamilytree.com/family-tree-historical-maps-book-europe>.
For maps of modern Germany, you can try using Google Maps <maps.google.com>, although you’ll only see one match for each village name you search, even if that name applies to multiple towns. Instead, the engine will find one village with the entered name while ignoring the others, which can be frustrating. A workaround is to search for neighboring villages instead, if you know any. The German National Tourist Board <www.germany.travel/en/index.html> has a variety of maps among its arsenal of resources. But the best online, modern-day maps are served up by the folks from ViaMichelin <www.viamichelin.com>.
We’ve already given you the “tease” about the mega-gazetteers that will be profiled in part 2 (and the big websites also have some regional gazetteers, too), but one stand-alone site deserves mention: Kartenmeister <www.kartenmeister.com>. This is a comprehensive database for villages in the former Prussian areas that now lie mostly in Poland.
You’ve been given the “once over lightly” version of German history in chapter 1, but you’ll often need to get deep into the weeds to determine which political units your ancestor’s village of origin belonged to throughout time. In some instances, the historical maps in this chapter will help clarify things for you; in other cases, you’ll need chapter 9’s more detailed breakdown to get you to the right places for records about the village. In the meantime, you may want additional historical information on Germany, and several websites provide you with this sort of information. The best is German History in Documents and Images <www.germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org>, which describes itself as “a comprehensive collection of original historical materials documenting German history from the beginning of the early modern period to the present.” Each section presents narrative as well as documents from the chronological period being studied, with full English translations.
Records (and record transcriptions) aren’t foolproof, so you’ll need to think outside the box when searching. Whether you’re dealing with a website database that requires an exact name match or one that accounts for spelling variations in its search, you’ll need to play with the spellings of personal names and place names to make sure you see all possible records. No search algorithm can successfully account for all possible differences.
Over the three chapters in this book’s part 1, you’ve been exposed to basics of both genealogy in general and German genealogy in specific, resources to obtain the language skills you’ll need for the various types of websites, and the tools for ungarbling names of places and people. You’re probably now feeling like a race car driver waiting for the green flag to take off. Next, in part 2, you will see how big outfits such as Ancestry.com <www.ancestry.com>, FamilySearch.org <www.familysearch.org>, and MyHeritage <www.myheritage.com> serve information to you while the other mega-sites Genealogy.net <compgen.de> (the ultimate multifaceted help site) and Archion <archion.de> (the specialized Protestant church record spot) give you their scads of data. Then part 3 will start with the questions that come most to German genealogists’ minds and match them up with the websites that have the best possibility of giving answers. Damen und Herren, start your engines!
Centuries of mistranslated and misheard names have made tracking German place names and surnames into historical records difficult. However, you’ll find that words had a tendency to be misspelled in different ways based on how non-German speakers may have misinterpreted them. This three-step PNK worksheet is designed to help you identify these potential spelling variations so you can broaden your search for your ancestors and their hometown. You can download a Word-document version of this worksheet at <ftu.familytreemagazine.com/trace-your-german-roots-online>.
1. Study phonetic hints. While you won’t be able to predict all misspellings, you can troubleshoot for the most common transcription mistakes.
| Initial Letters |
See Consonant Interchanges and Vowel Shifts for more. |
| Vowel Shifts |
Any umlauted vowel (i.e., any vowel with two dots over it) can shift into just about any other vowel in English records! In addition, the second letter in German vowel combinations is usually the one that “speaks”—e.g., ie is a long e, ei is a long i, and eu makes the oy sound. Many German “short” vowels are interchangeably re-spelled. “Long” vowels include shifts such as:
|
| Consonant Interchanges |
Letters that can be interchanged are:
|
| Combinations/Syllables |
Combinations/syllables in original manuscripts may be today interpreted as:
|
| Translations |
Check for English versions of the German name (or its syllables) in case it was translated (e.g., check Little for Klein, Baker for Bäcker, and Shoemaker for Schuhmacher). |
2. Create a master variant diagram. This chart, which you can fill in below, lists the surname as you know it today, possible vowel or consonant shifts that apply to the name, and each spelling variant you’ve identified by using the possible letter differences. Two examples have been provided for your reference.
| Surname Today | Possible Vowel, Consonant, and Syllable Shifts | Possible Spelling Variants |
|
Snyder |
Sn or Shn or Schn y or ei or i d or t or th -er or -ur |
Snider, Sniter, Snytur, Sneider, Sneiter, Sneither, Schnyder, Schnyter, Schnyther, Schneiter, Schneither, Shniter, Shneider, Shneiter |
|
Zeifenbeck |
z or s ei or ie or e or i or ü f or pf or ff en or in -beck or -baugh or -bach |
Ziefenbach, Zeifenbaugh, Sieffenbach, Sieffenbaugh, Siephenbeck, Züffenbach, Süphenbach, Seifenbeck |
3. Begin searching records for spelling variants. Be sure to record what search terms you use and in which databases you search, as this will save you from repeating your efforts.