What language belongs to those accents?

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

Kaffeeklatsch, a very gemütlich, cozy gathering. It translates as ‘coffee chit-chat’

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

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

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

Just a head's up for those looking up dates further back (generally prior or 1752) or from some other countries cultures: People used di

It's amazing how curious you can get about people in no way related to you. I've written before about Olof Harrison, a Swede who mov

Our family has a photo of the framed wedding invitation of my 2nd great aunt and uncle. It's a charmingly simple one. When I first came

When you’re tracing an ancestor to Central Europe from a century or more ago, you need to find out which state they were from. Here are some

A series of correspondence to and ​​from the same people opens up a whole new understanding about them. Old Swedish postcards from greater

When learning about ancestors who immigrated to the US decades or centuries ago, you get a double challenge. Not only is there the translati

Eliese Trede, my mother's grandmother, immigrated in 1908, leaving her loving parents on a journey across the Atlantic. This is her 1925