A chance encounter with an 1801 document from Greene County, Pennsylvania got me thinking about early German records in western Pennsylvania

Whether the printed German Gothic (aka Fraktur) or the old German handwriting (Kurrent or Sütterlin), here are a couple free resources to h

Deciphering German church records can be tough. A German translation cheat sheet and a few tips should help you along your way.

What challenges of reading an older document, such as a 15th century manuscript, and what can its language tell us? Who, when, where & more!

When you look at old books into the 1600’s, it looks like they mixed u and v up with abandon. Originally, there had only been one letter.

A 1497 German manuscript stashed in a Boston desk opens a window into German enfeoffments - relationships between feudal lords and vassals.

Why do we dot our i's? Minims! Old English and old German writing and printing added the dot to decipher which letter was which. Read on!

Part 1 of 3 It's not every day you find a medieval German knight's letter in an old desk. What on earth? Well, Laurence Posner of...

A comma, semi-colon or period - different quotation marks in different languages - Agh! What an interesting history to punctuation marks.

Tax Time: Plucked Chicken - In English we say the tax office fleeces tax payers, Germans say plucked! Translation is fun, isn't it?

Unlocking the umlaut. History of the two dots.

Unlock Your History launched in 2017! Check out some favorite posts about language history & translating old German, Danish, Swedish.

What language belongs to those accents? From German to Norwegian Hungarian or French, see different accents that some languages use.

Beethoven and Goethe, the German Shakespeare, were glad to see liberator Napoleon come, and glad to see occupier Napoleon go. Napoleonic la

You’re tracing your family back, and the spellings sometimes just go crazy.

Save letters! I have a treasure trove of memories downstairs. So began the email from my mother earlier this week.

The first U.S. president born in the United States (so after the country’s founding) didn’t even speak English as his first language.

English, Dutch and German are all related languages - the languages diverged - you can see it in how the same original words now differ.-

I’m typing away and I’d like to add a letter with an umlaut (two dots sometimes above a vowel)….agh

The main Celtic traditions for genealogy are the Irish, the Scottish and the Welsh. Complicating matters, Irish settlers brought Gaelic from