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
- May 11
- 1 min
What's in a name- George?
Translating names can be tricky. Look at the name George, Jurgen, Georgios, Jorge and Yuri - all the same. Here's some history.
36 views
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
Stefan Israel
- Mar 16
- 5 min
Celtic Footsteps across Germany- the Undarkening Ages
Medieval Irish and Scottish influences still felt in Germany and beyond.
99 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
- Apr 2, 2021
- 3 min
Brahms’ Lullaby, the Wiegenlied
Genealogy is family, and family is parent and child, and what binds parent and child like a Wiegenlied? A Wiege is a cradle, a lied is a...
1,373 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
Stefan Israel
- Jun 24, 2020
- 2 min
Kaffeeklatsch
Kaffeeklatsch, a very gemütlich, cozy gathering. It translates as ‘coffee chit-chat’
449 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
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?
639 views
Pamela Israel
- Dec 13, 2019
- 3 min
1960 Christmas Card Mystery
Why were there piles of Christmas cards from 1960 sent from around the world to a young girl in Virginia?
178 views