10 Translation

 I enjoy going page by page through an old German church book, tracing families through baptisms, marriages, and deaths, back into the murky past of my ancestry. How did I get here? I trace my start to a meeting with Lewis Bunker Rohrbach in Switzerland...

The old Swiss farmhouse at Paradiesweg 5, Worb where I met Lewis

In 2008 I had just started my family research, first trying to learn a little about the Swedes in my heritage, then branching out a bit to my Swiss and then to my wife's Scottish heritage. I knew I had an interest in my ancestry, but I did not think of genealogy as a hobby. Tracie, our eldest, had just married, and my wife and I had planned a trip to Europe with our son Travis who had just graduated high school. Our middle child, Cristin, was going to be in Europe already, and we planned to meet up midway on our trip, in Geneva.

Using family heritage as a bit of a guide, we had selected Scotland, Switzerland, and Sweden as destinations, and planned to spend a week in each, and so I prepped to visit different family heritage sites in each of these countries. My Swiss great-grandmother Eliza Greub had come to Colorado from Lotzwil, Switzerland according to family stories, and her mother was from Koppigen, and so we planned a couple days in that area, staying in a hotel in Solothurn, after visits in Geneva and Gruyères.

I didn't know much about our Swiss, and so I had arranged for a visit to a genealogy office in Worb (found with an Internet search) set up by an American named Lewis Rohrbach, where I hoped to pick up some helpful information, including a couple CDs filled with church book record images from Lotzwil and Koppigen. And so I showed up at 10 am at the Genealogie Zentrum Worb, home of SwissGenealogy.com on Tuesday, July 29, 2008, with my son Travis, after dropping my wife and daughter off at a laundromat in Bern – they were not interested that much in genealogy, and almost 2 weeks into our trip, we did need to get some things laundered. Lewis Rohrbach met us when we arrived; the center was a renovated old Swiss farmhouse. 

Travis recorded that visit, and this week I listened to that recording again. I really knew nothing at this point about German church books, yet Mr. Rohrbach spent an hour and a half going over all the basics I would need to get started, patient to a fault. He explained how to navigate the CDs, how Swiss church books were organized, the idea of Heimat or home town citizenship, etc. He patiently answered my questions on emigration, sources I would find useful, and showed me how to look up my towns and ancestors in those sources. Lewis was analytical like me, and the time flew by quickly. He stated his opinions plainly: e.g., 

"There are no good histories of Switzerland... there are some general histories of Switzerland, but Switzerland is not large enough for people to have done much - in English." 

Re-reading his book "Guide to Swiss Genealogical Research," I can imagine him talking that day. I finally had to beg off, so we could get back to rescue my wife and daughter at the laundromat in Bern.

In the fall I started going through those CDs, trying to capture some of the writing examples in letter tables that I could use as a reference. I had learned to speak a little German 25 years earlier, but had never really encountered the old script found in German language church books. I printed out a set of blank alphabet charts, and when encountering a new minister's handwriting, found examples of each letter and wrote them myself in the blank templates until I got the basic feel for that person's writing.

Here is one of the first records I found and translated, the baptism of my great-great-grandfather Rudolph Greub in 1824. The handwriting is clear and consistent, some of the best you might encounter. Even so, when I first translated it, I missed many of the words, but they are all clear to me today after years of practice: 

Lewis Rohrbach died 2 January 2016. I liked this quote from the obituary written by his wife posted on the Amherst College website: "A few months before his death, knowing that he was working against time, he wrote to a friend, 'There is something simply magical about being about to go into old German from the 1500s and 1600s which has never been transcribed much less translated, and solving problems.'" I would agree: thanks Mr. Rohrbach!

More on translation:

To get a basic idea of the characters you are looking for, an alphabet chart makes a good start: just Google the term "German script chart." It is impressive how varied the writing of a letter can be. Here is just the letter "g" from Kenneth Smith's "German Church Books":

Lewis Rohrbach recommended Smith's book which is also a good source for figuring out how to traverse a church book in search of a family. Unfortunately these Picton Press books are out of print, so you need to look for a used copy:

After I got familiar with transcription and looking through church books, the source I found most valuable for translation was Ernest Thode's "German - English Genealogical Dictionary," an amazingly complete dictionary of words you might encounter in these records.

The Murkier Past

The records in the 1800s are pretty clear, and have a decent amount of information. Going back into the 1700s, the records can become harder to read. This continues until the records no longer exist; for Switzerland the earliest records are in the 1500s and 1600s. In birth records, sometimes the mother's name is omitted, or just her given name is captured. The script becomes harder to decipher, more Latin is found, and the spelling of surnames can change.

Here is a baptism from 1618, in Koppigen, "24. Octob. ein Kind touft heist Durs. Parentis: Hans Affolter, Margreth Hinger. Zeugen: Hans Mülitaler, Michel Sÿber, Barbara Mathis". The Family Search family tree currently says this is the baptism of my 8-times great-grandfather Durs Affolter to my 9th-great-grandparents Hans Affolter and Margaretha Hinder, but I haven't verified all the generations back myself yet. As you can see, the handwriting is quite a bit different than the 1824 record!

 

Today, general information on getting started on Swiss genealogy is easily found on the Internet. For example, the familysearch.org wiki has a number of online videos, and pointers to online records. Local information is available in books, but typically not in English. And there are many online forums where you can get help with translation. I guess that at some point in the not too distant future, all this information will be available already translated into whatever language you would like!