Nothing creates a larger brick wall to genealogy research than a foreign language. Documents brought with immigrants were written in their native languag and when that language continues to be used for several generations after arrival in this country, you will run into the language barrier a lot sooner in your research than you expected. This is what happened to me.
Most of my ancestral lines lived in or had regular contact with Baltimore City, Maryland. Many came from Germany. So many people of German ancestry lived in Baltimore that there were private and public German schools and a German newspaper. Under these conditions, German was still being spoken, written and read by my ancestors well into the mid 1900s.
The first records I encountered in German were those of Zion Lutheran Church in Baltimore. The volunteer kindly translated the records for me and, more importantly, interpreted the handwriting. But then, a cousin sent me an article about our 3G Grandfather from Baltimore’s German newspaper, Der Deutsche Correspondent. I speak a second language and it is not German. But we were never going to what this article said if I didn’t take a crack at it.
The typeface used in the old German newspaper was so ornate that I had trouble figuring out which letters they were. I scoured the Internet and found a blog post with the typeface to letter comparison. [1] Once I could write out some of the text, I could try Google Translate to get a sense of what the article was about.
Im altern von 47 Jahren ist am Samstag in seiner Wohnung, Nr. 609, West Cross strausse, Hr Johann Michael Niclas nach lanrem kransettlager verschieden.
"In the age of 47 on Saturday in his apartment, No. 609, West Cross Street, Mr. Johann Michael Niclas is different according to lanrem craneset storage."
Even with this translation hachet job, we know where Johann lived and his age. The latter part of the sentence requires another review of the typeface. This is time consuming but very do-able. When I started, translating such an article took me an hour. It takes around fifteen minutes now. And, if you speak a second language, compare the translation to English to the translation to the second language.
Im altern von 47 Jahren ist am Samstag in seiner Wohnung, Nr. 609, West Cross strausse, Hr Johann Michael Niclas nach lanrem kransettlager verschieden.
"A la edad de 47 años el sábado en su apartamento, No. 609, West Cross Street, el Sr. Johann Michael Niclas es diferente según el almacenamiento del juego de grúas lanrem."
The clarification I get is in the translation of the opening phrase; At the age rather than In the age as Google had translated it. We did not need the comparison for this correction. However, there are many that are less obvious than this one.
Now, I will stop and look at a translation dictionary to double check the meaning of verschieden which I am sure that I am spelling correctly. It means different or various. In both the Spanish and the English it translated to storage due, likely, to the misspelling of the two previous words lanrem and kransettlager.
Let’s work on those words now. Do any of the letters look like another letter in a word that has been successfully translated? Run a few variants through the translation dictionary. I tried kranfenlager and the dictionary suggested Krankenlager or sickbed. That seems correct. I add an umlaut to the word länrem and I am going to revisit verschieden. I see that in another translation dictionary that verschieden can sometimes mean passed away. Remember, we are translating German from the late 1800s and archaic uses of words need to be explored.
Finally, here is our translation with a couple of manual corrections:
At the age of 47, Mr. Johann Michael Niclas in his apartment, No. 609, West Cross Street, passed away on Saturday after a long hospital stay.
[1] Helps for Translating Old German Typeface, Oct 18, 2011, http://nancysfamilyhistoryblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/helps-for-translating-old-german.html
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