Do you have the red German-English Genealogical Dictionary by Ernest Thode? If not, you are missing out! Someone told me about the dictionary years ago, and they could not believe I didn’t have it yet. And once I finally bought it, I couldn’t believe it either. The dictionary was AMAZING.
Translating German records can be difficult, because many of the words used in the 1700s, 1800s, etc. are no longer in modern German dictionaries today. Just like we no longer go around saying “thee” and “thou”, there are many German words of the past that have fallen out of use. So how are we supposed to find out what these words mean?
Enter Ernest Thode – he solved the problem for us. With almost 300 pages of German words that appear in our genealogy documents, this book is a must-have for all family historians. From hard-to-find historical words such as “weiland” (the late, deceased) and “Morgen” (a unit of land measurement) to obscure abbreviations such as “MNG” (Minnigerode Grenadier Battalion) and OKR (Oberkirchenrat, chief church council), as well as numerous occupations and Latin words, this dictionary helps solve even the most difficult translation problems. I use my copy every day!
So you can imagine how excited I was to get to interview Ernie and ask him all about his process for creating this book that is so special to us genealogists. Read on to find out how he went about creating the dictionary, some of his favorite and least favorite words, and more fascinating tales.
1. How did you get started in German genealogy?
My grandmother lived with us for as long as I can remember and she told me stories of her growing up as a young girl and tending the sheep.
2. That’s fun! What about learning the German language? Have you been to Germany frequently?
Though my father was born in Germany and was naturalized, and my mother’s parents were both born in Germany, I was born during World War II in Indiana and English was always our language at home. That being said, when my parents had an argument or a secret to keep, they used Plattdeutsch (Low German dialect). It was easy enough to pick up from the context and cognate words, but I didn’t let on that I understood.
While I was in high school, I did use two old elementary school German primers that my uncles had and taught myself a little German from that, but my first formal German class was at Purdue University.
My German travels were a summer-long NDEA institute for German teachers in Bad Boll; a four-week course for my German students at the University of Salzburg’s international summer school; a trip with my wife to our respective ancestral areas and visiting with family; and a genealogy tour I led to people’s ancestral villages, where they could greet their relatives, see their farms, meet local experts, visit my town’s sister city and the school of our annual exchange students, and go off the beaten path like visiting a self-playing musical instrument museum in Rüdesheim am Rhein.
3. Those sound like amazing travels! So what made you decide to write a German-English Genealogical Dictionary?
It was really designed for me. I was doing translations, much like yourself, Katherine, and I needed to learn a lot of offbeat, specialized terms that were not easy to find.
4. We’re so glad you did! What was your process for finding the definitions of the words? What records did you use? Which dictionaries did you use?
My process was largely adding terms as I came across them in my translations. I needed to use lots of reference books. These are not terms that are normally found in the standard dictionaries, such as Langenscheidt or Cassell’s or Muret-Sanders. My computer was my default place to keep my useful words together, more a reference book like a Brockhaus or Duden or a genealogical publication by a firm like Starke or Degener, all of which I used.
I also used books such as Central European Genealogical Terminology by Suess and A New Dictionary by Schrader-Muggenthaler. I just started my own list and kept adding and adding, combing through every word list I could get my hands on. Latin words, abbreviations, French words, weights and measures, monetary terms, map terms, illnesses, heraldry, abbreviations, given names, you name it. I deliberately gleaned words from all types of sources, so I think there can be no major gaps.
5. Those weights and measures and monetary terms are definitions I really appreciate! Those were so hard to find online for me, so I was so glad to find the answers in your book! How long did it take for you to compile the entire dictionary? Did anyone help you?
My initial reaction was that it took 3 or 4 years, but quoting from my actual book, “nearly a decade.”
6. Oh wow, what a work of love! Did you ever get nervous about getting a definition incorrect?
No, the words were pretty much already defined for me. Every error is mine. However, one reviewer really irked me. I don’t remember exactly her words. Let’s say that she said I defined a coin as “cabbage” but never mentioned what the one word was that I got wrong. I think she also complained that a “German-English” dictionary was not English to German.
7. That would have been a completely different undertaking! Were there any terms you found particularly surprising or difficult to translate?
I was surprised that there are so many terms for godparents: Godt Goettel, Gevatter, Pate, patrinus, levans, and many variations. There are some terms that I don’t think have any English equivalent, like Schwippschwager, brother of a brother-in-law or sister-in-law.
8. Oh, Schwippschwager is one I’ve never heard before – love learning something new! How did you decide whether to include a word or not, especially regional variants?
I think I erred on the side of inclusion, though I probably did decide not to include all dialectal variants.
9. Do you have a favorite historical German word? A least favorite?
One word that I am always happy to see is Familienregister, because I know it is like a Family Group Sheet and contains 3 generations of a family, mentions the out-of-wedlock children, gives dates of emigration, and cross-references the families of the children.
My least favorite word may be Ahnenpass (a document used to prove the holder’s Aryan descent for multiple generations), because of the atrocities it was associated with. The document itself can be very useful for genealogy, though one must be careful not to blindly accept.
10. Oh yes, I’ve translated many of those. Interesting for genealogy, but you’re right, a horrible reason to be created. But I do love the Familienregister as well! Would you ever want to make a new edition of the dictionary? Are there any words you wish you had included looking back?
I have been asked about a new edition before but have said no. If you would take a look at my own desk copy, though, you would see that I have inserted more words on every page over the past 33 years, and there have been new developments in genealogy such as the MeyersGaz website and AI (the German for AI is KI, Künstliche Intelligenz) and DNA (German uses DNA or DNS) and GIACR (Roger Minert’s series German Immigrants in American Church Records). Maybe the term is “Never say never.” I would need to talk to my publisher about any new edition or supplement.
11. “Never say never” is good! Back to words – is there one particular word you wish more genealogists would better understand?
Not a word, but the concept that geographic terms/designations change over time. There was no German state until 1871, but people came from “Germany” on the 1850, 1860, and 1870 censuses. Prussia was in what is now Poland and Russia and Lithuania, and it was later provinces in the German area north of the Main. Not all “Hessians” were from Hesse. Nobody in the 1800s was from “Baden-Württemberg,” they were from one or the other. And on and on.
12. That can be confusing for a lot of people for sure. Besides your dictionary, what are your go-to tools or books for researching old German records?
I no longer have my basement full of German genealogy books and periodicals, which are now distributed to various places where I think they will have a good home and get used for research. Nowadays I use the familiar online sites such as https://www.familysearch.org/en/united-states/ , https://www.ancestry.com/ , https://www.myheritage.com/ , and https://en.geneanet.org.
Some of the German sources I frequently use are https://meta.genealogy.net/ https://www.archivportal-d.de/?lang=en, https://www.bundesarchiv.de/en/research-our-records/, https://www.archion.de/en/, and https://data.matricula-online.eu/en/suchen/. The newspaper portals I most commonly use are https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/newspaper , https://digipress.digitale-sammlungen.de/search/simple, and https://zeitpunkt.nrw/ .
13. Great sites! And finally, to finish up – do you have a favorite genealogy story, either from your own family or from a record?
There are so many case studies I could use, but I will pick my wife’s ancestor Jakob Tüscher, who became Jacob Tisher in America. From the Monroe County, Ohio, county histories I knew that he and his son Abraham came to the U.S. on a 3-masted French vessel, the “Eugenius,” to New York, landing in (Perth) Amboy, New Jersey, in 1819.
One day in 2013, I casually entered the search terms “Tüscher” and “1819” in Google Books, and it came up with a hit from a book mentioning “Tüscher, Vater, und Tüscher, Sohn” by a Ludwig Gall, who wrote about his emigration to America in 1819 on a ship called the “Eugénie.” And the book had an illustration of the ship. It was two large volumes in German – the first about the emigrants and their voyage, the second about America.
Gall was a compulsive writer who told all about their voyage from Antwerp. This led me to try another probable wild goose chase. I wanted a passenger list, but I knew that U.S. arrival lists begin in 1820. I tried to find embarkation lists in Antwerp, the Belgian archives in Brussels, and the Dutch archives in The Hague, all without success. But I knew it was a French vessel, so I contacted the archives in Rouen, a port city, which sent me to the French military archive in Brest. They kindly emailed me a crew list for the “Eugénie.”
It was a crew list of a French military ship refitted for passengers, but it also contained the list of passengers with full names, sex, occupation, age, and place of origin, including all of the Ohio settlers. I couldn’t leave all these genealogical goodies undiscovered, so I gathered material and wrote a book, Swiss Pioneers of Southeastern Ohio, published in 2017.
A copy eventually made its way to Switzerland, where Ueli Balmer, the president of the Genealogisch-Heraldische Gesellschaft Bern, saw the name Sebel in my book. It turned out it was “his” Maria Sebel, the very woman wrongly accused of being the mother of his ancestor, a parentless foundling child left in Balm (thus the origin of his surname Balmer), one of the passengers. He developed an article in 2020 about this emigration group, which he called “Das Projekt Rosenau,” followed by a 150-page book of the same name and a presentation to the society in Bernese Swiss German. I watched this on video, of which I understood approximately zero words of the dialect!
All this because one day I happened to play around in Google Books looking for Tüscher! Genealogy is like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re going to get.
Wow, what a great story! Amazing what just playing around can lead to and the impact you can make!
Thank you so much for sharing everything, Ernie! We love your dictionary and you have helped so many people in the genealogy world! We are so grateful to you!
Thank you so much to Ernest Thode for sharing his story with all of us at Germanology Unlocked! We greatly appreciate it and loved learning about the process!
If you’d like to order Ernest Thode’s dictionary for your genealogy research, click here!
5 Responses
Excellent interview. I’m so glad to see Ernest is still involved with genealogy. I attended a seminar he gave in the early or mid-1980s and he opened up a whole new world for me with my German ancestors. I was able to travel to the small German village where my great-grandmother lived before she came to the US, and meet some living relatives. And I still have his German to English book I bought that day. Thank you, Ernest!
Debra Hust Allison
I’m so grateful for Ernest’s dictionary! It was great because it had all the words I needed and was so much easier to use than toggling back and forth on my computer! It really helped me transcribe records much faster and easier! Thank you for the interview- it’s nice to know more about the author of such an amazing, helpful book! One person truly can make a positive difference!
What a great interview with Ernie!! He needs an assistant to help him get all those margin scribbles into an updated dictionary for all of us.
Oh my word, this is inspirational, thank you for sharing!
Ernie feels like part of the family – some similar experiences, family names, and the same sense of gathering momentum when a little inquiry turns into an unexpectedly time-consuming research project!
And yes, I feel inspired to dust off old family letters and continue the quest!
Wonderful read,The ET Dictionary has been a Great Resource tool.
Thanks to Katherine for turning me on to this wonderful book.