A few months ago, I was talking to a friend of mine in the hallway at church and she mentioned to me that she found a family Bible with lots of names and dates written in it, but that it was in German. She said she was looking for someone to translate it. (Let me back up and just tell you that I LOVE anything to do with genealogy and family history.... it was a crazy obsession of mine several years ago when my kids were babies.... I had to have an intervention... and then my kids got big, so I am sort of over it now, but like anyone who struggles with an addiction, I have to be careful or I will very easily get sucked back in and my life will become out of balance....not that that's a bad thing, mind you) When she said that to me, something happened to me and it was like I had this out of body experience. My mouth was telling her, "I took German in high school, I'll take a crack at it".... OH MY GRAVY!!!!! At the same time those words are coming out of MY mouth the rest of my body is standing there as if I were two people, looking at myself, thinking what the heck are you talking about. It has been over 25 years since I have read or spoken anything in German, except to sing the alphabet song once in a while, just to annoy my kids....hahaha! Not sure how to get out of it now that my other self just volunteered "us" to do this, I thought... I will just look at it and then simply tell her it's WAY out of my league, but that I know someone who actually DOES know German, so as a back up, I would offer to put her in touch with this other friend.... HA!... problem solved.
She brings me photo copies of the hand written entries and I am looking at this and thinking to myself.... "Self, you are so full of crap to think you are smart enough to be doing this!" When I got home, out of curiosity, I decided to take a closer look and I was making absolutely no sense of it. I set it aside and kind of forgot about it for a few days..... Every day, those pages sat on my desk, mocking me, whenever I tried to get on facebook. I felt so guilty, I got them out again and decided I was really going to try to see if I could figure this out. I felt so guilty, in fact, that I even prayed about it!!!
The only thing I knew about these people was one of the surnames. So I started there. I thought once I figured out how they formed the letters in that name, then I could use those letters as a key to try to figure out other words. (The German language has letters that are not part of our alphabet and their cursive letters that ARE part of our alphabet are formed differently that we form cursive letters) So I printed a guide off the internet of the handwritten German alphabet and it all started coming back to me. I became obsessed (see, I wasn't careful and got sucked in!) I started to look at certain names and by instinct a thought would pop into my head about what that name was... then I would look at it and think there is NO WAY that can be THAT name. So I would go letter by letter and slap the dog and spit in the fire, if it didn't turn out to be the name that I was impressed that it should be.... EVERY TIME!!!!! then I started on the locations... The dates were easier because I remembered memorizing the months in high school. By some small miracle (or maybe it was a BIG one for these people), I was able to figure it out.... all of it.
It was one of the coolest things I have ever experienced! Feeling inspired that something that I didn't understand or recognize could just come to my mind as clear as the words you are reading right now.
I don't profess to be someone who is in the league of people who translate hieroglyphics or ancient scripture or anything like that, but in some small way (miniscule, actually) I was a tool for inspiration to help the information on these people be known to a family member who desperately needed to know about her ancestors. I am humbled to have had the privilege of being a very small part of that important project. I believe that these people live even after death and that they really wanted my friend to know about them so she could take care of some important unfinished business on their behalf.
Guess what????
She has another one!!!
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