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

1934 Chicago newlyweds used their wedding photo for their Christmas card decades before photo Christmas cards were popular.

Why does German Capitalize everything? If you look at much German, you start to notice- they use a Lot of Capitalization. Not just for nam

The brief story of a royal heir, his wife and her lover....and a curious pattern from von Königsmarcks

By 1700, one-fifth of Berlin was French-speaking, and they remained French-speaking until siding with the rest of Germany against Napoleon.

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.

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...

Translating names can be tricky. Look at the name George, Jurgen, Georgios, Jorge and Yuri - all the same. Here's some history.

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

Unlocking the umlaut. History of the two dots.

Medieval Irish and Scottish influences still felt in Germany and beyond.

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

Brahms' Lullaby: Genealogy is family, and family is parent and child, and what binds parent and child like a Wiegenlied?

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.

We have kept the old word “merry” from a day when Christmas was anything but a Silent Night

Ludwig van Beethoven was baptized the 17th of December, 1770, in Bonn, a small city on the Rhine River.