Last year I blogged about meeting a distant cousin through Whova, a conference ap. I also mentioned it in the lecture I presented for the National Genealogical Society in May. Social media is a wonderful way to connect with your disconnected relatives. We are 7th cousins. Definitely not close but we have been able to connect through a share German great grandfather Kettering.
On May 22, Gerhard and his girlfriend, Rita, visited my home. It was a wonderful visit! In the morning we visited our local farmer’s market, toured my town, went for brunch, and then returned to my home where we spent hours doing genealogy together.
Gerhard looked over my online family tree and corrected the many German name misspellings I had, particularly regarding locations. I have terrible trouble with diacritical marks!
He brought me updated tree info with sources found in German archives that are not accessible online. I agreed to create a tree for his colleague who found an old genealogy that claimed that some of his family emigrated to Indiana in the 1800s. I confirmed that indeed, they did, after stopping first in Kentucky. I was able to find living descendants for the colleague to contact.
The best part of our genealogical afternoon, besides spending time with a new cousin, was his explanation of a mystery newspaper article that I have written about previously. I had a dickens of a time initially getting native speaker consensus on the word “birthshaus.” I used a German teacher who was born and raised in Germany, some of my family members, a Facebook posting, and a posting to a genealogical group I belong to and received the translation as tavern or coliseum. I have even tried AI and gotten the same results. Clearly, there was no coliseum in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1834. I did find a tavern so I selected that word to use in the lineage society application I was submitting.
Gerhard laughed when he saw the word. He explained a better word usage would have been “beer house.” I was confused so he explained German culture from that time period. After church on Sundays, the ladies would congregate together and spend the day chatting. Their husbands would retire to the house next door to the church that served beer. There, they would drink the day away until their wives came to get them to go home for dinner. Gerhard did not know that the culture had been brought with the immigrants to the U.S. Apparently, it had in Ohio, all because of the newspaper article I found and Gerhard’s knowledge of the customs of people from the home region.
In the United Kingdom, a public house where beer was sold and consumed was known as a beerhouse (Beerhouse act 1830 (11 Geo. 4 & 1 Will. 4 c. 64). That would have been the best term to use in the translation.
Having someone who was knowledgeable about the language, customs, and culture was what I needed to solve my genealogical mystery.
Next week, more helpful hints from Gerhard!