
“Awesome. Engaging. Funny. Smart. Best speaker of the day.”
Just got home to find this treat in my inbox. I am thrilled to read the words my [ancestor] Christopher read; that he felt deeply enough to quote. Great job on the translation.
“Katherine’s presentation was ultimately the most informative of all the sessions I’ve been to today! I’ve been struggling with being able to decipher all the German records that I’ve been looking at, and now I understand many of the words & abbreviations of those words!”
I asked Katherine to transcribe and translate a baptismal record written in Old German script from 1828 about my Great, Great Grandfather. We had hit a brick wall in our Erkenbrecher genealogy and we just couldn’t find where or who our relatives were in Germany. Katherine did an excellent job of translating this document which divulged the parents of our GG Grandfather. Because of this finding, I have been able to go back eight generations in our Erkenbrecher family tree, all the way back to Hei…
Thank you for these amazing translations! I never dreamed so much additional information was hidden in those records, such as Wendtlandt being an organist, the ringing of the bells (I was a music major and enjoyed those bits of information), and the emergency baptism. These are examples of facts and events that make a family story real – and I know that my husband’s family will be surprised and glad to learn of them. I now realize how much I’m missing when I look at these old records. Ancestry o…
Katherine was instrumental in helping me give my wife—her words—“the best gift she has ever gotten.” For forty years, she has had copies of letters to and from her beloved grandmother and her siblings handwritten in German. Katherine translated the letters beautifully, providing us with both the German and English digital files. She was always responsive in our communications and met challenging time deadlines so that I could give my wife the letters as a Christmas present. Her fees were…
I highly recommend Katherine to anyone looking for accurate, expeditious, and highly professional translations. Katherine went the extra mile to ensure an accurate translation of my German university records. She even contacted my educational institution in Germany to ensure the proper interpretation of obscure abbreviations throughout the document. Stellar work.
My German in-laws would not say one word about the past, however when they both passed away, we found two huge boxes of letters, journals, and pictures that documented every day of WWII for them. We also found 100 years of old family documents to prove they were Aryan in accordance with the Nuremburg Laws. For the last ten years, we have figured there was one person in the family history who had converted from Judaism and that person had saved those who came after from certain death, but we coul…
“Katherine’s advice on websites and other resources for getting started in German genealogy was straightforward and very helpful in targeting the most useful places to begin your search. Likewise, she provided numerous tips, tricks and shortcuts for deciphering that difficult German handwriting with lots of instructive class exercises.”
“With a lack of robust German census records available to most researchers, it’s nice to take a look at alternative records. Genealogy researcher and translator Katherine Schober has uploaded a fantastic video appropriate for beginning and intermediate genealogists online for free. She’s a great presenter, and I hope she updates her YouTube page with more videos in the future!”