ROOTS & BRANCHES

A couple of weeks ago I took a step back to what a “core collection” of Pennsylvania German books looks like and promised to explore those resources in “Roots & Branches” sporadically over the next few months.

Probably the most needed skill for those with Pennsylvania German ancestry is language. And, no, not for the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch dialect, since that was a spoken language only before it started dying out after World War II.

Rather, it’s the need for some interrelated language skills to understand handwritten High German documents that such genealogists need. And, yes, there are some books for that.

First, a great “get your feet wet” book is Katherine Schober’s Tips and Tricks of Deciphering German Handwriting.

Schober’s an excellent, academically trained German translation expert, and her book is the perfect gateway for a researcher to orient him or herself with the archaic cursive script used for most records in the German language into the 1930s. The book can be offered directly from the author at the URL, https://sktranslations.com/product/tips-tricks-deciphering-german-handwriting

In addition to helping researchers identify lookalike letters, Schober introduces readers to vocabulary, one of the other language skills that German genealogists need.

Which leads us to our second premium resource: Ernest Thode’s German-English Genealogical Dictionary, which was first published in 1992 and has been reprinted numerous times since. I’ve seen Thode “on the prowl” at conferences hearing a new word and writing it down for him to include in the next enlargement of the work!

The dictionary is filled with words no longer used as well as ones that would have no use in a general use German-English dictionary but are crucial to genealogists.

Thode’s work runs around 300 pages and is a necessary tome for every serious researcher’s bookshelf. You can buy it from Genealogical Publishing Company at the URL, https://genealogical.com/store/german-english-genealogical-dictionary/

Finally, there’s a book that comes in the same humble spiral binding as when it was first self-published by the late Edna M. Bentz, bearing the evocative title If I Can, You Can: Decipher Germanic Records.

Bentz’s book has a wonderful list of the several dozen script variants for every letter of the alphabet, but it doesn’t stop there.

She also includes some general German genealogy information, as well as listing “relationship” words, occupations and illnesses. For all of these latter lists, she shows how the word would be written in the most common historical German script handwriting.

Bentz’s book is available from a variety of booksellers.

Next up, we’ll concentrate on the oeuvre of one German genealogist of particular consequence: Rogert P. Minert of Utah.