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

This is an 1843 letter from my 3rd great grandfather, to his son telling him to hurry home from the army before his mother dies. We have a l

Day 2 to highlight the Art of Handwriting and your Family through January 23rd, National Handwriting Day. Share a favorite family hand-writt