1497 German Medieval Letter
Part 1 of 3 It's not every day you find a medieval German knight's letter in an old desk. What on earth? Well, Laurence Posner of...
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Stefan Israel
- Apr 27
- 5 min
Punctuation and the Genealogist
A comma, semi-colon or period - different quotation marks in different languages - Agh! What an interesting history to punctuation marks.
51 views
Pamela Israel
- Apr 14
- 1 min
Taxes: English Fleeced to German Plucked
Tax Time: Plucked Chicken - In English we say the tax office fleeces tax payers, Germans say plucked! Translation is fun, isn't it?
47 views
Stefan Israel
- Mar 30
- 2 min
Two Dots and an Umlaut
Unlocking the umlaut. History of the two dots.
252 views
Pamela Israel
- Mar 6
- 1 min
Milestone Favorites: Language, History & Tips
Unlock Your History launched in 2017! Check out some favorite posts about language history & translating old German, Danish, Swedish.
71 views
Stefan Israel
- Jun 15, 2021
- 4 min
How to Spot the Dot
What language belongs to those accents? From German to Norwegian Hungarian or French, see different accents that some languages use.
730 views
Stefan Israel
- Mar 5, 2021
- 4 min
When France Came to Germany
Beethoven and Goethe, the German Shakespeare, were glad to see liberator Napoleon come, and glad to see occupier Napoleon go. Napoleonic la
686 views
Stefan Israel
- Jan 28, 2021
- 4 min
Why Couldn’t My Ancestor Spell Their Name the Same?
You’re tracing your family back, and the spellings sometimes just go crazy.
597 views
Pamela Israel
- Jan 14, 2021
- 6 min
A Plea to Save Letters!
Save letters! I have a treasure trove of memories downstairs.
So began the email from my mother earlier this week.
86 views
Stefan Israel
- Oct 30, 2020
- 1 min
Our Dutch (Speaking) President Martin Van Buren
The first U.S. president born in the United States (so after the country’s founding) didn’t even speak English as his first language.
849 views
Stefan Israel
- Apr 13, 2020
- 3 min
DUTCH, not DEUTSCH: English, Dutch and German
English, Dutch and German are all related languages - the languages diverged - you can see it in how the same original words now differ.-
1,268 views
Pamela Israel
- Mar 30, 2020
- 2 min
ä ë ï ö ü - Umlaut on the Keyboard
I’m typing away and I’d like to add a letter with an umlaut (two dots sometimes above a vowel)….agh
129,858 views
Stefan Israel
- Mar 17, 2020
- 4 min
Celtic father-names: Donaldson, McDonald, O’Donnell
The main Celtic traditions for genealogy are the Irish, the Scottish and the Welsh. Complicating matters, Irish settlers brought Gaelic from
566 views
Stefan Israel
- Mar 2, 2020
- 4 min
Understanding -Sen and -Son in a Name: Johnson, Janson and Jansen
Why do some family names end in -son and some in -sen?
7,166 views
Stefan Israel
- Feb 10, 2020
- 2 min
Dutch and Deutsch: so similar, so dissimilar
We’d talked about how much the German dialects vary, looking at dialect forms of the Lord’s Prayer. Let’s compare High German and Dutch.
614 views
Stefan Israel
- Jan 29, 2020
- 2 min
AUGH! From German to English
AUGH! It’s not just a cry of distress, it’s an anglicization. Why do we see lots of names ending in -augh? Baugh, Grumbaugh, Brumbaugh?