John Blankenbaker's Germanna History Notes

Note 434

Vic Kemper sent information about the sources of data in Germany.  He writes that the village of Ferndorf church has all the records of the Müsen people before 1642.  The records in Müsen actually start in 1649 (this was one year after the end of the Thirty Years' War).  Both Ferndorf and Müsen have a roomful of leather-bound books of their own records of births, marriages and deaths.  The Müsen records are more accessible than those of Ferndorf, in that their records before about 1750 have been transcribed, categorized and typed.  The old books are also readily available in each church by request, if you are good at reading the old German script.

What do the names Baker, Barlow, Carpenter, Cook, Deal, Deer, Early, Fisher, Garrett, Good, Holt, House, Miller, Price, Rouse, Slaughter, Snyder, Tanner, Thomas, and Weaver have in common?  They are all good German names spelled in an English way. Some of the rules in the conversion from German to English are:

1. Keep the essential sound, and the meaning, but use the English spelling.  This is possible in many cases because English and Germany are from the same language family and many words are quite similar.  In the list of names above, Cook (Koch), Fisher (Fischer), Good (Gut), House (Hauss), Miller (Müller), Snyder (Schneider), and Weaver (Weber) are good examples.
   

2. Use the English word that means the same.  Examples are Carpenter (Zimmermann), Deer (Hirsch), and Tanner (Gerber).
   

3. Some Germans names have no particular meaning, but they are converted by using an English spelling:  Deal (Diehl), Early (Ehrle), Thomas (Thoma), Rouse (Rausch), and Holt (Hold) are examples.  Or Willheit in German becomes Willhite in English.

If a German name has a distinctively German flavor, and, if there is no obvious English equivalent for it, then it is more apt to kept its German flavor.  Thus, Holzklau in the German kept its flavor but converted the "z" in the German to the English "tz" which catches the sound better.  the "klau" in German is more easily understood in English as "claw."  The sound is preserved and the spelling is adjusted to show this better.

One of the problems of German ancestry research is that any one appearance of a German name may appear in an unpredictable way.  The name Gerhard appears, once, in the Orange County (VA) records as Carehaut.  It takes a bit of imagination to recognize that the two names are the same.