2024
52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks
Week 10
Prompt – Language
I wish I knew German. Many of my older family documents are written in German.
My paternal grandfather, Franz Peters was German speaking. In fact Franz and Elisabeth Peters spoke German at home. I am not 100% sure but I believe my father, Jake Peters' first language was German because of the fact that his parents spoke German. However growing up in Hague, Saskatchewan, it is possible he learned English for school despite the home language spoken was German.
GRanDMA is the Genealogical Registry and Database of Mennonite Ancestry. GRanDMA is the database that is searched with GRanDMA OnLine.
And from this database I got the following individual profile of my grandfather, Franz Peters. It shows the sources used for Franz Peters. The one I was most interested in was: Die Mennonitische Rundschau, Published in Elkhart, Indiana 1880-1908; Scottdale, Pennsylvania 1908-1923; Winnipeg, Manitoba 1923-2007 [7 May 1952, p11]. This was a German Newspaper with information from their homeland and individuals living in Canada. Of course it was written in German
This is the article that I found at The Saskatoon Mennonite Society. They have every newspaper of the Die Mennonitische Rundschau, I photocopied it thinking it would be easy to take home and translate. Not only is it in German but in a style called Sutterlein where the alphabet does not look like many letters of our English alphabet.
There are many many genealogical sites that have tutorials on translating documents from this obscure German script to English alphabet. I even noticed that there is an “ai” program that will decipher old script German documents to English.
The newspaper article has some bits of
information that I can read because I know when he was born and
married. Those dates are easy to pick out. However there is a lot of the article I haven't translated.
I did have fun inputting my name and have it written in Sutterlein Script.
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