What language belongs to those accents?

Beethoven and Goethe, the German Shakespeare, were glad to see liberator Napoleon come, and glad to see occupier Napoleon go. Napoleonic la

You’re tracing your family back, and the spellings sometimes just go crazy.

Save letters! I have a treasure trove of memories downstairs. So began the email from my mother earlier this week.

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.

English, Dutch and German are all related languages - the languages diverged - you can see it in how the same original words now differ.-

I’m typing away and I’d like to add a letter with an umlaut (two dots sometimes above a vowel)….agh

The main Celtic traditions for genealogy are the Irish, the Scottish and the Welsh. Complicating matters, Irish settlers brought Gaelic from

Why do some family names end in -son and some in -sen?

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.

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?

Why were there piles of Christmas cards from 1960 sent from around the world to a young girl in Virginia?

Sewing, in addition to laundry, used to be a responsibility that almost every woman had. And yet it can be tough to get insights into this p

The tribes that coalesced into Germans spoke 'the people’s/ popular language’ as opposed to Latin

Not long ago, a friend asked me why we say Germany when the Germans use the word Deutschland. The words aren't even related! Good quest

What on earth is going on with those letters? The s looks like an f !It sure does. I hope you never need those last couple of sentences. Old

Here are a couple tricks to help decipher old German handwriting, Kurrent or Suetterlin, especially important with old family letters.

German and English both mostly use h the same, as that puff of air at the start of a word: hello/hallo, here/hier, horn But what’s that h do