Genealogy Forum NEWS
August, 1998
German Language SIG
AOL Germany
submitted by
FSCTgringo@aol.com
Hallo,
am Donnerstag
16.07.1998
21.30Uhr
im NEUEN Ofiziellen Konferenz Raum IV ---klick hier (Historical Link Removed)
¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡ Achtung Neue Zeit und Neuer Raum !!!!!!!!
ist es mal wieder so weit. :-)
Zeit für den Chat für Ahnen-, Familienforscher und Genealogen.
So wir haben schon wieder einen Neuen Chat-Raum.
Aber dieser Raum soll jetzt unser letzter sein.
Er wir auch weiter bestehen wenn wir unser Forum eröffnen
Wir würden uns freuen, Euch am Donnerstag im Chat begrüßen zu können, bis dann, Euer G-Team, FSCTHanno, MamiBaer, FSCTgringo, Klammi1, GTRalf und JEJanke :-))))
Hello,
Thursday
16.07.1998
at 3:30 pm eastcoast time till 5 pm
In our NEW official Conference Chat Room IV click here (Historical Link Removed)
¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡ ATTENTION new time And new room !!!!!!!!
It's time again :-)
To have our weekly chat for genealogy.
We have another Chat-Room.
But this room should be our last.
This room will be available when
we will open our own Forum
We are happy to see you Thursday in the chat.
So long your G-Team, FSCTHanno, MamiBaer, FSCTgringo, Klammi1, GTRalf und JEJanke :-))))
Locating An Ancestral Home In Germany
submitted by
Nelson R. Sulouff
zuli@sprintmail.com
I have received from a new E-mail friend, Heinz Zulauf of Glashuetten, Germany, a useful method for trying to locate an ancestral home in Germany. Anyone with Internet access can do it. The method will be old stuff to some, but I have never seen the method described on this List, and I am sure the method will have been untried by many List subscribers.
Occasionally we have the surname for an ancestral German with no idea of his or her home area or where to look for records in Germany. Most of us know the LDS (Mormon) International Genealogical Index (IGI) is a superbly useful tool to identify concentrations of an old surname in Germany. Another way is to analyze current phone listings, and many researchers have never tried to do this. Researching telephone listings works surprisingly well because German society has not been as mobile as that in the USA, and surnames have tended to remain in the same area for very long periods of time. Identifying current surname concentrations in Germany can point to where an ancestor lived centuries earlier. It is worth a try if simpler, easier methods have failed to locate your ancestor's hometown.
I have been researching the surname Zulauf in Germany for over ten years and am still uncertain of the hometown for my ancestor who came to America in 1776. Recently I received a surprising and very welcome contact from Heinz Zulauf in Glashuetten, Germany. He was surfing for his surname on Internet and found my Webpage about the American immigrant Johannes Zulauf. After a couple of exchanges of E-mail between us, he performed a telephone analysis for the name Zulauf in Germany and sent me the results. It is opening up some new possiblities for identifying the hometown of Johannes Zulauf in Germany. Instructions on how to do this telephone research are detailed below. You may want to print out these step-by-step instructions to have them at your elbow if you try this method of research, especially if you have not worked with these kinds of tools before.
1. Go to Website http://www.Teleinfo.de/abfragen/bin/neuabfrage.pl (Historical Link Removed - Unable to relocate this site)
2. Scroll down until you come to the boxes for entering information (Warning: avoid being distracted from your purpose by the obtrusive ad which comes up on your monitor). In the "Name" box, type the surname you are trying to locate, then go back up a line and click on "Anfrage starten." In a few moments a page will come up noting the NUMBER (in bold print) of times that surname is listed in German telephone directories. Taylor, Gable Und Denver Waren Früher Typisch Deutsche Namen
3. To look at all the phone listings for that surname on screen, click again on the button "Anfrage starten." The entire list for all of Germany will come up. They are arranged according to postal code areas, lowest to highest numbers. The postal code number consists of five digits and it appears in front of the name of the town or city. (The longer number on the line below that is the telephone area code and the telephone number for the person.) You can just scroll through the list looking at the postal codes and decide where the most telephone subscribers are located, or you can send this whole list to the printer, which prints about 15 addresses per page. (For Zulauf there were 442 listings which required 29 printed pages.)
4. If you have entered a common name, you may not want to deal with the entire list. You can pare down the list by entering limiting criteria in the search boxes and doing another search. Go back to the page where you entered the surname in the box. In Netscape you can back up to that page by clicking the "Back" button in the upper left corner. Otherwise scroll to the bottom of the phone listings, click on the highlighted word "Anfrage," and a new search page will come up.
5. Do a new, more limited search by having the original surname in the "Name" box, and entering a number in the "PLZ" (postal code) box. If you noted on the complete phone list that the postal area beginning with the number "3" had a lot of phone listings for the name you looked up, just put a "3" in the "PLZ" field and hit the "Anfrage starten" button. You will be told the NUMBER of phone listings in the postal area beginning with "3." If you want to look at this more limited list, click the "Anfrage starten" button again. You will see that some towns in that postal area have many phone subscribers with the surname in question, while other towns may have very few. If there are a large number of addresses beginning with the numbers "32" in the postal code, do a new search limiting the results to the "32" postal code area. Perhaps you will learn that the next largest grouping will be in postal area "326," so you can run a new search with "326" in the "PLZ" field. You can keep identifying the area with the most phone subscribers until you get down to a relatively small area, and this may be at the center of your ancestor's home area. You should refer to a map to locate the towns in question in order to decide if that is a likely area and you want to pursue further research in that area.
6. Since Germans were very fond of repeating the same forenames within a family line, you might run a new telephone subscriber search, reducing the number of "hits" for a surname by entering the forname of your earliest known ancestor in that line. See how often that same forename name comes up in Germany. If there appears to be a concentration of phone subscribers in a given area with both the same forename and surname as your earliest known German ancestor, this might also turn out to be the provenance of your German ancestors.
This method of analyzing current telephone listings in Germany yields only probabilities, not certainties. There's an old PA-Dutch saying, "It's better to look for potatoes in a potato patch than in a cabbage patch." So it's better to look in Germany for the provenance of your ancestors where you see the surname concentrated today than to look for their hometown where today there are only the surnames of others.
If you try this method of looking for a surname in the German telephone directories and nothing turns up, the best thing to do is to try an alternate spelling, some spelling very similar to the oldest one you know, or a spelling that would have the same sounds as the oldest surname you know for your ancestor. Remember to take into consideration the German umlaut spellings for words which were often simplified in America (e.g., Huebbel > Hubbel and Hubble), and for the doubled "ss" in German which often became a single "s" or sometimes a "z" in America
(e.g., Geiß -> Geiss -> Geis and Geise).
If you have questions about the above outlined process for searching telephone listings send me E-mail, and if I get stuck with a question, my new friend, Heinz Zulauf in Germany, has told me he would try to help. I may have to refer a question to him and ask him to get back to you. Never give up without asking for help!
Happy hunting,
Nels
submitted by
JEJanke@aol.com
Von Rolf Liffers, dpa =
Münster (dpa) - Wenn die Filmdiva Elisabeth Taylor wissen will, ob sie ihren Familiennamen vielleicht deutschen Einwanderern verdankt, kann sie demnächst in einem Lexikon nachschlagen.
Auch Leinwand-Stars wie Clark Gable oder politische Größen wie Eisenhower und Albright könnten deutscher Abstammung sein. Professor Jürgen Eichhoff von der amerikanischen Pennsylvania State University jedenfalls hat in jahrelanger Forschungsarbeit festgestellt, daß sehr viele US-Amerikaner Namen deutschen Ursprungs tragen.
Die Taylors hießen früher oftmals Schneider. Gable kommt von Göbel, Eisenhower von Eisenhauer und Albright von Albrecht. Anhand des Familiennamenbuchs, das 1999 im Verlag Oxford University Press erscheinen wird, werden "die Amerikaner erstmals die deutsche Herkunft ihrer Familiennamen erkennen können", kündigte der 61jährige Sprachwissenschaftler bei einem Besuch der Universität Münster (Nordrhein-Westfalen) an. Der auf vier Bände ausgelegte Wälzer werde ihnen "ganz neue Erkenntnisse über ihre Familiengeschichte liefern".
Den historischen Hintergrund der Wandlung deutscher in amerikanische Familiennamen bildet die um 1830 einsetzende Einwanderung von mehr als sieben Millionen Menschen deutscher Muttersprache in die USA, erläutert Eichhoff.
Wie dem Linguisten bei den Recherchen für den deutschen Teil des Nachschlagewerks auffiel, machten die Amerikaner nicht viel Federlesens mit fremden Namen, die sie weder aussprechen noch schreiben konnten. "Während die falsche Aussprache oder Schreibweise von Namen in Deutschland üblicherweise korrigiert wird, wurden deutsche Namen oft schon bei der Einschiffung der Auswanderer in den Passagierlisten amerikanisiert".
Lange Zeit wurde in der Neuen Welt "wenig Wert auf eine korrekte und einheitliche Schreibung von Familiennamen" gelegt, berichtet Eichhoff. "Namen ungleicher Schreibung brauchten nur ähnlich zu klingen, um von den Gerichten beispielsweise bei Erbansprüchen anerkannt zu werden".
Erst mit der Verbreitung des Autos Anfang dieses Jahrhunderts sei die Schreibweise von Familiennamen nach und nach amtlich festgelegt worden. "Noch heute besteht in den USA keine Meldepflicht," schildert Eichhoff. "Die Behörden unterscheiden nach Sozialversicherungsnummern. Und weil die USA keine Einwohnermeldeämter kennen, ergab sich erst mit Anmeldung und Versicherung eines Autos die Notwendigkeit, sich für eine bestimmte Schreibweise des Familiennamens zu entscheiden." Die mildeste Form der Namensveränderung bestand im Ersatz im Englischen nicht vorkommender Buchstaben durch andere. Beispiel Geissler statt Geißler. Die nächste Ebene war die Teilübersetzung: Aus Braunstein wurde Brownstein, aus Steinweg Steinway.
Auch die Verkürzung war populär. Aus Deutschendorf wurde Denver, aus Birnbaum Burns. Verbreitet ist die direkte Namensübersetzung. "Stellte sich ein deutscher Auswanderer als Herr Koch, Schneider, Zimmermann, Müller, Seidensticker oder Freitag vor, wurde er kurzerhand in Mister Cook, Taylor, Carpenter, Miller, Silknitter oder Friday umgetauft," erklärt Eichhoff.
Bei der Komplettübersetzung könne allerdings nur die individuelle Familienforschung herausfinden, ob hinter einem ganz englisch aussehenden Namen tatsächlich ein deutscher Einwanderer gestanden habe. Zur Verschleierung ihrer deutschen Herkunft hätten viele Immigranten ihre Namen auch selbst verändert. Sicher vom Namensträger nicht beabsichtigt war die verbeitete Verballhornung von Namen. Birkenbeul, Pfannebecker und Kirchtaler mißrieten zu Porcupin (Stachelschwein), Pennypacker und Cashdollar.
©dpa
060100 Jul 98
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Hallo,
Ingrid found a very interesting article about german and american names. Unfortunately it is very long, so I tell you the main facts, because I don´t know what happens when you use the translating program:
Professor Jürgen Eichhoff from Pennsylvania State University has been researching and found out lots of American names have German origin:
Taylor = Schneider
Gable = Göbel
Eisenhower = Eisenhauer
Albright = Albrecht
His book will be published in 1999 by the Oxford University Press publishing house and will contain 4 sinle books. According to his knowledge german names were even changed before the imigrants started their journey. In contrast to Germany, where all names allways were corrected, in USA they were Americanized. To get right at American judges in cases of inheritance the names only had to "sound" the same.
Registration of the correct spelling name came, when cars had to be registred and the owner had to pay insurance. Still today there is no law of a local registration of citizens like in Germany (in German: Meldepflicht or Einwohnermeldegesetz). The American system still only works with the social registration number. Registrating a car suddenly made it neccesary to decide for a certain spelling of the name.
The easiest way to change the name was changing letters the English alphabet does not have:
Geißler = Geissler
The next level was a part translation:
Braunstein = Brownstein
Steinweg = Steinway
Also popular was to take a short form of names:
Deutschendorf = Denver
Birnbaum = Burns
...or real translation like:
Koch = Cook
Schneider = Taylor
Zimmermann = Carpenter
Müller = Miller
Seidensticker = Silknitter
Freitag = Friday
Bye, Jens :-)
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