Customer Reviews

If I Can You Can Decipher Germanic Records

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I remember the dread with which I first faced German genealogical records written or printed in Gothic script. It seemed like a completely alien alphabet. However, with a little practice and the useful examples in this book, you can decipher such records yourself.

This book covers the Gothic alphabet and shows variations of handwritten script for each letter. It then provides handwritten script examples of common genealogical words and their German and English translation. Handwritten symbols and common abbreviations found in Germanic records are also covered.

Sections are devoted to showing side-by-side comparisons of Latin, English, Danish, and handwritten German script for common genealogical terms, occupations & titles, and diseases. There is also a useful timeline. This handy book is spiral-bound.

The task of deciphering letters and documents written in the style of the last century can be a dismaying task. Edna Bentz' examples are very helpful to anyone who wants to learn. As she so positively indicates by her title: "If I Can You Can."

This book has a 0ver 50 pages of Script Examples with translations, which I found very helpful. On the downside, there are about 25 pages of World History timeline that does NOT help me read the old German Script. I suppose I could look at it this way, ---- I received a 50 page booklet of help deciphering old Germanic Script and a 25 page bonus of history timeline, BUT I would rather have had 25 more pages of help to decipher Germanic Script. The timeline is mentioned in one review, but I had no idea it would take up almost a third of the book. That is why I gave a four star instead of five star rating.

Pages are color coded by topic, [ genealogy terms, illnesses, occupations, Latin terminology etc ]. ] which is nice, and the Germanic - Latin terminology section is helpful with Catholic Church records in Script. Spiral binding easily keeps the book open to the page being used.

This is a homemade book (copyright 1982), spiral bound photocopied on regular photocopy paper, but single-sided so there's no bleedthrough from the other side. But you get beyond this and find that Edna Bentz (who I believe is deceased, the book is carried on by Tamara Bentz) did a heck of a job. If you do a google on figuring out German script, this book constantly turns up as a valuable reference.

An outline of the book's major sections:

Alphabets - This is fascinating, because she gives you Old Gothic standard and then many (like 30 for EACH letter) handwritten variations that she found in different documents.

Common terms - This covers a lot! For example, one part is Relationships. For each term, she shows you the handwritten script, the typed German word, and the English meaning. The first word in this section is "angenommenes Kind" = adopted child. In the German script shown, the capitalized K in Kind (in German, you capitalize nouns) looks like a capital R, which is also illustrated in the alphabets. I never would have guessed that it was a "K".

Common terms also includes genealogical terms (such as two words for ancestor), abbreviations (ex, "b.v." = beide von = both from), church and feast day terms, months and days.

Common Latin terms are included, with English, Danish and German Script equivilents, because many records may be found in Roman Catholic Parish records. (The Schleswig-Holstein area was, at one point, under Danish rule.)

There's a glossary of illnesses found in German church records with the German word, German script, English, Latin and Danish equivilents.

Next is a large list of occupations and titles, first in the German word, then German script, English, Latin and Danish. Sometimes, she'd found more than one word with the same meaning, such as Barbier and Bartscherer for Barber.

The next section is an informal time-line. Starting in 1300, and ending in 1930, it lists major European occurances that would have affected Germany, in the spheres of Religious & Political, Musci, Art & Literature and Daily Life. A 4th column, titled Ancestors, lets you fill in your family information. As Edna writes, "Genealogy and Family History is more than just names, dates and places."

Finally, appendeces list German ordinals and their German script, and German time references.

This is really a fine little book, and the multitude of handwritten examples is great. Facebook has a page for this book, so I believe it is still available, perhaps just not in a lot of places.

I did not know German when I started researching my family, but with this book combined with on-line German-English translation dictionaries, I've been able to read all the records I want to read. The on-line dictionaries aren't helpful enough by themselves because they don't contain many of the old words that are in "Decipher Germanic Records" and because the old penmanship is too confusing without help. The variety of penmanship samples and the large lists of illnesses and occupations with penmanship samples of the words have helped me translate records I couldn't read before.

THIS BOOK LOOKS TO BE A GREAT AID IN DECIPHERING MY 1828 BIRTH RECORD IN GERMAN SCRIPT. LOVE IT!