*[Warum lachst du?]
I have spoken and written about Ortssippenbuechen (i.e., place + genealogy + books) and about the general lack of these important books here in America. The number of libraries which hold them is very limited. After the LDS FHL in Salt Lake City, the Library of Congress, and the New York Library, there aren’t many libraries that have copies. (If you are visiting the Germanna Foundation Library, I believe there is one for Sulzfeld.) I have used them at the LoC and I own one (for Diefenbach). A search on Google will turn up a large number of these books, especially for southwestern Germany. When one does this, you will very often find that the limited press run has been sold out.
It seems to me that it would be good to convert these books into PDF files on a CD. This is exactly what I did with Beyond Germanna where I had 917 pages of printed material. A typical Ortssippenbuch does not have this many pages. One would want to establish that German is the language of the material because the conversion program converts the optical scan to text. Since these books are all in German, the conversion process should recognize this. Some of the more recent Ortssippenbuch may be in a machine-readable form which would make the process even simpler.
Is the German language any problem for use in America? I don’t think so. These books use a lot of symbols and a very limited vocabulary. There is no need to convert them to English to make them useful.
If the Germanna Foundation were to undertake a program of this nature, I would gladly volunteer my services to help make the translation possible. The market should be quite large considering how many libraries there are in the US and how many people have some German ancestry. It might be necessary to pay the owners of the copyrights a fair share of the proceeds.
Surely, someone has considered putting the contents of these Ortssippenbuechen online. To protect the owners of the copyrights, it might be necessary to make this a fee service.
I have been told that the LDS is considering putting their microfilms of the German Church Records online. That is, they would digitize the material and make it available to users. I don’t know whether this is true; it would not surprise me. Still, the conversion of the Ortssippenbuechen would be useful.
*[Why are you laughing?] (The subject of this note is NO laughing matter.)
(04 Apr 07)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.