Candles in the snow

It is Christmas Eve in Germany and the anticipation of the advent season approaches a fever pitch. There is a bustle of activity as last minute preparations are made--shopping had to be finished by noon, last-minute packages are still being wrapped and hidden from children, mothers are scurrying about everywhere, and children are banished from the living room while the tree is put up and decorated behind closed doors, to be revealed at the sound of the bell.

In my husband's childhood home in Ravensburg, there is a mix of the German and English all year long, but Christmas Eve is all German; after supper my late father-in-law would take a daughter or two to evening mass at the Liebfrauenkirche, knowing there would be the opening of gifts--the Bescherung--upon their return. 

Winters in Ravensburg are usually white, and the snow shovel and a tub of sand for the steep front steps are a quasi permanent fixture during the winter. As soon as the churchgoers head out, Mama digs into a box and pulls out a handful of candles. Right before their return, she tucks lit candles into the snow banks lining the steps and walkway leading to the front door. The warm glow welcomes them home on one of the darkest nights of the year.

Candles light their way home

Bad luck, good luck

But for luck (and not just good luck), many, if not most of us, would not be here.

In 1949, a boy was born into my maternal Grandmother's family; on that auspicious occasion, the boy's grandfather, Howard Beck Cutting, typed a six-page letter, which included some tidbits of family history. We all know that lore almost always contains both bits of truth and bits of conjecture as we strive to fill in the blanks (in both personal and world history), but it does make for a good story.

And so it was with the improbable tale of how a young man from Massachusetts met a young woman from Tasmania. I'll let excerpts from Howard's letter tell the tale:

You know Tommy, you had a very narrow escape from not being here at all. Way back in 1869 a train had stopped at a little station in California to take on passengers, and having done so it had started up to continue on its way. A man running to catch that train failed to do so by a slight margin. Perhaps he was very much disgusted with himself for having missed it, however, I am sure that he was glad he had done so. If he had caught it there would have been no Tommy Cutting. 

[…]

Great-great grandfather and great grandfather had learned the painting trade and they went into business in San Francisco. They accumulated some property, however, for one reason or another such pieces were sold, presumably at a profit. It was during this period of their work in San Francisco that great grandfather [Eugene Augustus] Cutting took a day off in 1869 to go to Redwood City. A railroad had been constructed from San Francisco to San Jose 50 miles south of the city. He was the man who missed the train back to San Francisco and during the interval while awaiting the arrival of the next train he met Mary Beck.

Drawn by the rush for gold in California, the family of Eugene Augustus Cutting had come to San Francisco from Sudbury, Massachusetts; The promise of gold and riches also brought Mary Beck's family to California from Launceston, Tasmania. Eugene and Mary were married in 1869 in Redwood City, San Mateo, California, and had four children. 

As if that wasn't enough good fortune, they lived through the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. The fire was ultimately stopped only six blocks from their home in the Mission District.

Eugene Augustus Cutting and Mary Beck

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As a postscript, the baby boy to whom the letter was addressed passed away just a few months ago, after two-year battle with a disease that finally took him, all too soon. 

Fraktur, Kurrent and Sütterlin, oh my!

This year, I reached an important milestone: when I renewed my membership in our national professional association for translators and interpreters, I qualified for the life membership category, which is reserved for people over a certain age threshold and with more than two decades as a member. It is fitting, as I am wrapping up a lifelong career as a professional translator that began with studying French in high school oh, so many years ago. 

Those studies led me to a year in France, which led to me meeting the German man who would become my husband, which led me to return to Europe to do graduate studies, which led me to learn the language of my future in-laws, and eventually to marry said fellow (bonus: today is our anniversary). What I did not know was that my esoteric studies in paleography of middle and old French (and the ensuing thesis) would be of use later, not in my career, but in my personal activities in family history. 

As someone who received stacks and diskettes of "completed" genealogies, the prospect of tracking down my husband's little known family roots appealed to me. There was only one catch: even though the German and French languages pose few problems, the handwriting did. 

Modern French handwriting is a well-known entity to me; the older scripts, while still characteristically loopy, demonstrate the roots of a fairly straight evolution and are readable, especially if you are familiar with the language. But German posed a real challenge: first came Fraktur--what we would call blackletter--for printed materials. To my chagrin, after I learned the alphabet, using a printed chart from the 1950s, I discovered there is now an online tool that can perform optical character recognition on it. But once I move up the tree in smaller villages, it became apparent that church books written in Sütterlin and the older Kurrentschrift (and many others) were simply not in my skill set. Heck, I still had trouble deciphering my father-in-law's letters to us from this millennium (which turned out to be a mix of the Sütterlin he learned as a child overlaid with the postwar deutsche Normalschrift). 

But the same techniques that served to help me decipher medieval French manuscripts were of use here: using known words (often set phrases) in the document to establish baseline characters; looking at each letter separately (covering surrounding letters with your thumbnails or slips of paper is helpful); drawing the pen strokes in the air to understand the motions of the scribe--which letters were they trying to form? People writing by hand often omit things, or the hills and valleys of 'm,' 'n,' and 'w' may not add up--especially in longer documents. People have been getting writer's cramp for centuries, it appears. 

I can now add Sütterlin and Kurrentschrift to my toolbox; as a bonus, I can now read my father-in-law's journals. So even as family researchers sometimes curse the scrawl of census-takers (and celebrate beautiful penmanship), I try to take a moment with these documents, and feel the motion of their pen, which tells you a great deal of their state of mind while writing these things down--not just for their own use, but for us, their future generations. 

No longer a secret code