Sometimes the challenge in genealogy is sorting out language differences, both in translation and in writing styles. In his post about the Bruegenhemke place, Walt mentioned high and low German. We will look at that and then look at writing patterns.
Dialects
Low German, High German
Lizzie and her uncle Anton Kruempelmann. Anton, like Lizzie’s mom, Maria Catharina, was born in Germany.
German language has several dialects, just like many other languages. High German is the official written language of Germany. It is based on the spoken languages of the highlands of southern Germany and is spoken in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Low German is based in old Saxon language and is not spoken much these days except in certain areas in northern Germany. It does not have an extensive amount of literature like high German does.
Sure, some uncharitable people might call it my basement shop. Some particularly pedantic types might even note that I have a split-level house, so the basement isn’t even really underground. But screw them. I do experiments, so it’s a laboratory. And it’s probably as close as I’ll ever get to a supervillain’s lair. Let’s have a look!
In my post about the challenge quilt Snow Goose, I mentioned paper piecing. There are plenty of tutorials about it out there, but I thought I would show you how I do it.
When you are researching family history, you often find that names have changed over the years. It can make the search for your family’s history challenging.
There are a number of reasons a name might change – immigration, transcription errors, translation, marriage, a desire to fit in the local community or a desire to hide from something in the past.
In our family history, we have a few names that have changed over time – most notably Hoel. Several of Walt’s ancestors spelled it Hole. It seems to have changed back and forth a couple of times, and it also depends on which document you are looking at for a few family members. Walt’s great-grandfather was listed as John Swisher Hole. His son, Walt’s grandfather, was William Henry Hoel.
The information on this photo is copied from the back, and spells Hole as Hoel.
I worked in IT for 30 years. That usually meant you were on-call every other week to fix problems at night and on weekends. In the early days we had pagers that would just show a phone number. Eventually the pagers became smartphones, but we still called the alerts we got “pages”.
Some nights we got a lot of pages. Some weeks we would have a lot of those nights in a row. Sometimes we got pretty tired of it. I wrote the following on one of those weeks.
Rainy Day Pagers #12 & 35
(To the tune of Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 by Bob Dylan)
Well, they’ll page you when you’re trying to be so good They’ll page you, just like they said they would They’ll page you when you’re trying to go home, And they’ll page you when you’re there all alone. But that should not make you feel amazed, Everybody must get paged.
Well, they’ll page you when you’re at the breakfast table They’ll page you when you’re trying to watch some cable They’ll page you when you’re riding in your car And they’ll page you when you’re playing your guitar But you should not feel so disengaged Everybody must get paged.
Well, they’ll page you when you’re standing in the shower They’ll page you every day and every hour They’ll page you when they’re trying to pass the buck Then they’ll page you and then they’ll say “good luck” But your salary will not be getting raised Everybody must get paged!
Well, they’ll page you when you’re freaky with your wife They’ll page you till you think you have no life They’ll page you when you’re riding on a horse They’ll page you till your wife files for divorce But that should not make you feel enraged Everybody must get paged!
In my discussion of color in this post, I showed a quilt that used two blocks to create the design. This quilt also uses two blocks, and creates an interesting secondary design.
The finished quilt.
This was from one of the earliest classes I took after I joined my local quilt guild. It was before I started putting labels on my quilt, but I am pretty sure it was made in 2003.
The two blocks used in the quilt are commonly called a square-in-a-square and an eight-pointed star. Blocks often have more than one name, depending on when an where they were published. This square-in-a-square has also been called an economy patch.
The eight-pointed star in this quilt has two different color layouts.
The one on the left is the center block. The one on the right is the four corners.
The instructor was encouraging us to use our color placement to make secondary designs. I was so new to quilting that I didn’t understand what that meant until I took this class.
You can see that the eight-point star design is repeated larger.
By this time, I had started to understand that the quilting design added to the overall appearance, so I spent some time deciding how to quilt this one. The arc shape is the same size in the pale green circles as it is in the diagonal line going across the quilt from corner to corner. You can see it much better in this photo of the back of the quilt.
When I was a kid Mom would always talk about the “Brigham Emkey” place. Or maybe it was “Brigham Empty”. Or “Bring ‘Em Empty”? She said it all as one word, like “BrighamEmpty”, and it was hard to tell. But the BrighamEmkey Place was where Mom lived as a little girl, and she told a lot of stories about it. But I could never figure out the name.
In some recent posts I’ve detailed the process to build an alcoholstove from old beer cans, along with a pot support, windscreen, snuffer and fuel bottle. The only thing left to do, really, is try it out…
Quilts offer a lot of opportunity to play with color and color placement. When you change the color placement on a design, you can get very different looking results.
I have taken a fair number of quilting classes over the years. My favorite classes are those that stretch my skills and teach me new things.
Joining Hands All Around
In 2008, my guild had a teacher in named Sharyn Craig. Her class was teaching a couple of piecing skills – curved seams and y-seams. Piecing is the term for how you put the fabric together to make the quilts.
Delores was born on June 7, 1934 and died on January 25, 2005.
I remember sitting on the porch at my aunt and uncle’s farmhouse, listening to my Aunt Dee playing the guitar and telling stories. When I was very little, I thought she made up all the songs she sang for us. I remember being very surprised to learn that she didn’t write “You Are My Sunshine”
Aunt Dee and Aunt Genny, who shared a June 7th birthday. Aunt Genny was born two years earlier.
