ROOTS & BRANCHES

It’s not often that I’m an “early adopter” of, well, just about anything. Normally I like to see a track record – especially before I plunk down money to purchase a product or service.

But when Katherine Schober of SK Translations, a German-English translations service, decided to offer a “premium” membership with her company, she had me at the proverbial “hello.”

Of course, Schober did already have a bit of a track record with me. We’ve both been vendors at a variety of genealogy conferences during the past year and she has done some translation work for me that proved her bona fides.

In addition, she has become a columnist writing on German script for Der Kurier, the quarterly journal of the Mid-Atlantic Germanic Society that I edit.

So, when she’s promising monthly member-only articles, a weekly “Ask the Translator” hour, access to a special Facebook member-community page, and the choice of a free download of a vital record reference template in exchange for a $29.95 one-year membership – I’m all in.

I also like the fact that Schober’s membership doesn’t auto-renew, a hassle that turns me against some corporate entities that make it difficult to unsubscribe when they haven’t met your needs.

And I have every reason to think that Schober’s membership will be one that I will want to renew a year from now.

“I wanted to offer this membership to provide people with a chance to get quick and easy help with their genealogy and translation problems,” Schober said. “A chance to be part of a community, to support one another, and to be able to easily reach out to me when they can’t figure out words on a document – words that could be important for finding clues to their ancestors’ lives.

”While what piques my interest the most about translation services is the need to solve thorny handwritten German cursive script problems with church registers, Schober is an expert at going far further into longer and less templated documents, too.

She was quite excited recently to translate a letter written by the eminent Otto von Bismarck, the architect of German unification who served as the first chancellor of the Second German Empire. In fact, handwritten letters and diaries that exist in ethnic German families are one of the most underutilized types of genealogical records simply because of the difficulty in finding competent and affordable translators.

Schober, who has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in German, is an expert in both present-day German as well as the archaic Fraktur font typeface (used in most German-language printer materials from the 15th to the early 20th centuries) and Kurrent and Sütterlin, the most standardized German scripts used in handwritten documents.

In addition to the expected church and vital records, Schober also works with emigration documents, newspapers, journal articles and other written materials.

For information on the premium membership, the direct URL is https://sktranslations.com/membership-join