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