Articles by Michele Simmons Lewis

Practice Your German Language Skills

Practice Your German Language Skills

Michele Simmons Lewis, Student I have a tip for anyone working through the German courses. If you want some real life practice reading German documents I highly recommend that you volunteer as an indexer for FamilySearch. Not only will you be giving back to the genealogy community you will be putting what you are learning in the German courses into use and you will get feedback on how well you did.   Don’t know what Indexing is?  Here is some general information: The Family History Library is digitizing their microfilm. They need volunteers to index the images to make them more user friendly for researchers. You will download a small indexing program to your computer (FamilySearch will be switching over to a web-based indexing system soon). You can see what the program looks like and how it works HERE. You will need to watch/read all of the training materials You can then select a batch and off you go! “But I am worried that I won’t be able to read the handwriting and I will make a mistake!” All batches are indexed by TWO indexes. If the indexers disagree on anything the entire batch goes to an arbitrator who will decide There are batches for beginner, intermediate and advanced indexers If you ever pick up a batch and it looks too difficult you can throw it back into the queue and pick up a different one If there is something on a batch you need help with you can “share”…

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Learning More About the German Language

by Michele Simmons Lewis, Student I just completed my third National Institute for Genealogical Studies German course, German: The Language . I was looking forward to this one because I was wondering what the course could teach me considering that I am a native German. I was in for a few surprises. According to the course description found online, the course  covers the classification of German words, fundamentals of German grammar for family historians, and basic spelling conventions. The description states “One does not need to become fluent in the German language to be a good genealogist in German records. This course introduces the key information needed about the German language so researchers can be successful in reading German. Pronunciation of and writing in German is not generally necessary for genealogical research.” This course begins by teaching the basic language structure and essential German genealogy vocabulary, and then you translate excerpts from actual documents. There are 16 translation assignments but before you start having palpitations, each assignment is pretty short. After you translate each section you will then get to see the translation from the instructor. You can put all of these together to make your own translation guide for each type of document to refer back to. One thing that you learn very quickly is that once you know the basic root words you will recognize a lot of words in the documents. For example, any word that contains Geburt has something to do with a birth. I bought…

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Continuing My Journey Through German Records

By Michele Simmons Lewis, Student I chose Locating Places in Germany  as my second German course from the National Institute for Genealogical Studies  and I am happy I did. This course is packed with information to help you track down where in Germany your ancestor came from and how to locate the records for that location. Module 1 explains some of the pitfalls when trying to identify where in Germany your ancestor came from. It is easy to make a bad assumption. Some towns have the same name as other larger jurisdictions and there might be more than one town with the same name. This makes sense considering we have the same thing here in the United States. There is an Appling, Georgia (town) and an Appling County, Georgia. Appling the town isn’t even in Appling County, it is in Columbia County. I live in Harlem, Georgia, not to be confused with Harlem, New York.  Another thing to consider is the name of the town could have changed when another country took over that area. The borders were constantly changing. To learn more about this consider taking Introduction to German Research for North Americans  which gives a great basic history of Germany and the jurisdictional changes. You can learn more about this course in my previous blog post. Module 2 goes on to explain the different jurisdictional levels and it covers all of the German-speaking areas of Europe. Knowing the political divisions and at which level records are held will save…

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Introduction to German Research for North Americans

By Michele Simmons Lewis, Student So why would a native German take the German Records courses offered at the National Institute for Genealogical Studies? Most of the research I have done in the past 23 years has been in American records not German. I mistakenly thought that German family history research was pretty much impossible for those living in the United States. Although I was born in Germany, I came to the US when I was only six years old so I don’t have a good working knowledge of German geography or history. I do not know the laws that govern civil vital records, the traditions that govern the church records nor do I have knowledge about what records are actually available. These are the things I need to know, and the things I am counting on The National Institute for Genealogical Studies to teach me. Introduction to German Research for North Americans is my first course. In the first module, we learn the four essential things you need to know about an immigrant before you can do more in-depth research. I had the funniest problem with this week’s assignment! I needed to make a table of my German immigrant ancestors to include these four essential pieces of information. As far as I know I don’t have any German immigrant ancestors because my mother and I are the first immigrants. My family, both past and present, are in Germany so I contacted a genealogist friend of mine and borrowed a…

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