The "Real" Name

Have you ever had a relative correct you saying that your ancestor's "real name" was something other than what you have on the family tree or in your genealogical database?  Maybe this real name is the name that appears on a baptism record or the one that they preferred to be called.  Unfortunately, a name is not the same as a date.  An ancestor's birth date is an immutable fact.  Whether or not records are consistent or accurate, there is an objective birth date that can never change.  Names are much more changeable and contextually-defined facts.  I have a name that I use in official contexts and others I use in informal contexts.  You may have a nickname that family uses, one that friends use and one you use at work.  And these may change over time.

The proliferation of names is made even more maddening when other languages are added to the mix.  How can you decide what is the "real" name? Let's look at one example.

Case of Johann Georg Schöndorf
I have discussed my Schoendorf line before (here and here).  Records for this line are in French, German and Latin.  Records for Johann Georg Schöndorf who lived in the 1700s are in both Latin and French.  In his marriage record, a French record, he is "Jean George Schöndorf".

In his son's marriage record, a Latin record, he is listed as "Johannis Georgii Schöndorff".

There are two issues here.  First, the name is in Latin and, second, the name has a special form because it is possessive. This form is in the genitive case.  If we want to cite the Latin name, we should convert it to the nominative case, which is what is used as the default.  In this case the name would be "Johannes Georgius Schöndorf".  For more on Latin, check out this post.

But,  I know he spoke German, so what do we do? Do we convert the name to German or not?  It seems unlikely that he would use the Latin and French forms outside of records.  Fortunately, we have examples of the German name in his signature on the same two documents.

In this case it is probably safe to use the German form, but what if the only records you have are in Latin and not the local language?  Ultimately, you get to decide what name to use. The most important things to do are be consistent, so others will understand what you are doing, and recognize the reality that for some questions there is not always a clear or final answer. When you are transcribing a record, you should keep the name as close to what is found in the record and, to clarify, you can add a standardized name in brackets, such as "Jean George Schöndorf [Johann Georg Schöndorf]".

A tip for identifying the language of a document

When approaching a new document, the first thing you need to do is identify the language it is written in. Then, you'll be able to find an appropriate dictionary and other tools that will let you make sense of it. There are a number of ways to do this, but you often need look no further than the first three or four words.  Many records like birth, baptism and marriage records follow very common formats.  One feature of these documents is that they often begin with the date the event occurred or was recorded.  So, simply by knowing a few common expressions you can quickly and easily identify the language of a document.

My Schoendorf line lived for several generations in Peppenkum . Although now a part of Germany, this area was ruled at various times by both France and Bavaria.  Records for this predominantly Catholic area are written in at least three different languages, Latin, French and German, depending on the period and context of the document. For example, I have three different documents (all available at the Family History Library).  The first is from a marriage record in a church register from 1782 for Johann Georg Schoendorf and Catherine Conrad.
  

Source: Film 351837

The first words are "L'an mil".  L'an is a contraction of the French words Le, which is the definite article "the", and an, the word for "year". Mil is the word for "thousand".

Next is the marriage record for their son Johann Schoendorf and his wife Anna Maria Klinlger from 1817.

Source: Film 351839

The language has changed; in place of French we find the Latin phrase "Anno Domini milesimo".  Anno means "in the year".  If you just wanted to say "the year", you would use annus, but Latin has special endings that tell you what function the word plays (see this post).  In this case, the ending -o tells us that it means "in the year".  Domini means "of the Lord". Here the ending -i tell us that Dominus has a possessive function.  Finally, we have the word milesimo (usually millesimo).  For now, let's just say it means "thousand".  I have a post planned for dealing with Latin numbers, which are a bit complicated.

You may have noticed the similarities between the French and Latin words for year an and anno and those for thousand mil  and millesimo.  This is because French, like all Romance languages, descends from Latin.

The final record, from 1866, is the civil registration of the birth of Caspar Schoendorf, the grandson and great grandson of the above couples.

Source : Film 1057430

Once again we encounter a new language.  This time it's German.  The first four words are "Im Jahr ein tausend", which translates as "In the year one thousand".  This is almost a word-for-word translation of the English.  The only tricky part is the word "im" which combines the preposition in "in" with the definite article dem "the".

Because English is a Germanic language, you will notice the similarities between German and English.  The word Jahr, where the initial J is pronounced like English Y, is similar to the English word year, and tausend is very close to thousand.

The first few words in all three documents contain the same two words, "year" and "thousand".  Think of these as keywords; since you are very likely to encounter them in a document, they can help you identify the language.  It may not help for every record, but it is at least one way of narrowing down the possibilities.

Surname Saturday - Kowatch

This month I am focusing on surnames that are in some way related to that most common of English surnames, Smith.  Like people, languages can be grouped into families that are related by descent from a common ancestor.  Languages in the same family will resemble each other in many ways.  Last Saturday, I talked about the surname Smith, which comes from the word for someone who works with metal. English belongs to the Germanic language family which includes German, Dutch and Scandinavian languages.  So, you find surnames like Schmidt in German or Smit in Dutch with the same meaning and origin.

In Europe there are three very large and important language families: Germanic in the North, Romance in the South, and Slavic in the East. In Slavic surnames derived from the word meaning Smith are also very common.  These include Kowalski and Kowalczyk in Polish, Kovář in Czech, Kováč in Slovak, Koval and Kovalenko in Ukranian, Kovalev in Russian, and Kovač in Serbian. 


Mathias Kowatch in the US Census

My second great aunt, Gertrude Schoendorf, married Matthew Kowatch.  This surname is most likely related to the Slavic surnames described above.  But, before we examine how it is related, let's take a look at my aunt's father-in-law, Mathias Kowatch  In a post earlier this week (here), I explained how we can use census to explore our linguistic heritage. Mathias Kowatch can be found in four censues (1900, 1910, 1920 and 1930).  Several different responses are provided for his place of birth. These include both the place listed on his enumeration and that of his son.

1900 - Hungary
1910 - Germany
1920 - Slk/Hun.
1930 - Czechoslovakia/Hungary

But in the three years where the mother tongue is provided, German is given.  What's going on here?

First, the 1910 census appears to involve a mistake.  I would guess that the enumerator assumed Mathias was from Germany because he speaks German.  This would fall into the category of an error.  For the other cases we have to understand something about the history of the region. Before 1918, much of eastern Europe was under the control of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This empire was divided into two main parts: Austria and the Kingdom of Hungary. The Kingdom of Hungary covered modern Hungary along with modern Slovakia and parts of Romania and the former Yugoslavia.  The kingdom also contained large numbers of German minorities scattered throughout (See map of ethnic makeup of the empire here).  The pattern in the censuses suggest that Mathias was from what is now Slovakia and that he was a member of the German speaking minority.

Another clue comes from another error by the enumerator, but this time the error is in our favor.  Although the enumerator is only supposed to give the country of birth, sometimes a more specific location is given.  The 1920 census provides the following information:

This somewhat difficult to decipher place name may correspond to the town of Medzev, Slovakia, which is known in German as Metzenseifen.

The development of the surname Kowatch
Now that we have a better understanding of Mathias Kowatch, we can return to his surname.  One of the most common names in Slovakia is Kováč, meaning "smith".  In Hungarian, one of the most common names Kovács, which is spelled differently—both Slovak č and Hungarian cs are pronounced like English ch—but sounds pretty much the same way.  The Hungarian name is a borrowing from Slavic.  The name Kowatch, which was probably originally Kowatsch, is the German spelling of this Slavic name; German w corresponds to v  and tsch corresponds to the ch-sound.  Tsch may have been changed to tch under the influence of English words like "watch".

It is possible that this Kowatch family was originally Slovak or Hungarian, but were later Germanized, but there is no way to tell from the available evidence.  Perhaps a DNA test would offer some evidence. This is a good example of how names are not always the best guide to the ethnicity of your ancestors.  Although the origin of a name may point to your ancestors' origins, this may be very remote with your ancestors having assimilated to another culture long ago or they may have adopted a name which is unrelated to their own family's origins.

Exploring your linguistic heritage #3: U.S. Censuses

Not many records will directly address the question of what languages your ancestors spoke. One notable exception is census records.  The U.S. censuses provide two relevant types of information.

Mother tongue
The first type of information is direct; censuses in some years provide explicit information about language. Both the 1920 and 1930 Censuses ask for the mother tongue or native language of foreign-born individuals, while the 1920 Census also asks for information about the mother tongue of foreign-born parents. Take my 2nd great grandmother Mary (Runiger) Kingsbury. She was born in Ohio, so her mother tongue is not listed in the 1920 Census, but her father was born in Switzerland and her mother was born in Germany, so their mother tongues are listed here as German.

The language spoken by an individual may also be listed in the 1910 and 1890 Censuses, but only if he or she does not speak English.  My 2nd great grandfather, Paul Schoendorf, was born in Germany and spoke German, but also spoke English, so his mother tongue, German, is not listed in the 1910 Census.

In contrast, his mother tongue is listed as German in both 1920 and 1930.

1920:

1930:

Make sure that you know what is being asked.  Read the column headings and the census instructions, which can be found on the Census Bureau website (here).

Place of Birth
The second type of information is more indirect.  All censuses since 1850 have asked about the place of birth of individuals and every census from 1880 to 1930 lists the places of birth of both the father and mother of the individual.  The place of birth can be an important clue to what languages your ancestors spoke.  This is also a case where it is useful to check out the the census instructions.  There are very specific instructions about how to list places of birth.  For example, the 1910 instructions direct the enumerators not to list "Poland" but instead either "Germany (Pol.)", "Austria (Pol.)" or "Russia (Pol.)".

Keep in mind that there are limitations to using the census.  First, not all enumerators followed the instructions very well.  In some cases, this can be to your advantage; they may add more specific information than requested by the census. In other cases, this may mean incorrect information; they may have incorrectly assumed the language of individuals in the census or simply not understood the person being interviewed.

Second, information, especially about parents, may be incorrect.  Your ancestors may not have known this information or may have had some reason to give false information.  You may have an ancestor where the place of birth of a parent seems to change with every census.  However, don't immediately assume that the information is false; there may be important clues even when the information is inaccurate or inconsistent.  For example, for my 2nd great grandfather, Alfred Eugene Madison, his father's place of birth  is listed as New Brunswick (C. Fr. [Canada French]) in 1900, Can. English in 1910, and Scotland in 1920. Of course, the last census is not compatible with the earlier ones, but maybe this indicates something about his ancestry.

Finally, the place of birth only tells us what languages our ancestor may or most likely would have spoken.  No country is purely monolingual and there are always linguistic minorities.  Remember that place of birth is only a clue, it's not direct evidence.   

Exploring your linguistic heritage #2: Embracing complexity

It is important when we think about our ancestors that we don't make too many assumptions based on our modern situation. Many Americans live in a very monolingual world. We speak and write almost exclusively in English and every thing that documents our time here is written in English.

However, this is a peculiarly modern situation. Before the 19th and 20th centuries, most people lived in large multilingual empires. In the British Isles today, Celtic languages like Gaelic, Cornish and Welsh have been relegated to often shrinking communities at the peripheries, but if you were to go back to Shakespeare's time you would find large areas where languages other than English dominated. For example, as late as the 1890's Scottish Gaelic was the majority language throughout the Scottish highlands.¹

Be prepared for a degree of complexity that may be quite strange to us today. Many of our ancestors would have encountered many different languages in their lives. Records may have been produced in several different languages. It is very common for church and synagogue records in the same place to be in one language and government records to be in another. Throughout the world, Catholic church records were commonly kept in Latin. For my Schoendorf line in Saarland, I have church records in Latin and civil records in German and French. A single area may have changed hands, sometimes several times, and each time with a change in the language of administration. If your ancestors lived near a border, don't be surprised to find that the languages of the records changes from time to time.

To make things more complicated, your ancestors may not have even known the languages that these records where in. In some cases, they may have spoken a dialect very different from the standard form used in writing or they may have spoken a completely unrelated language. In other cases, your ancestors may have been comfortable in more than one language, switching from one to the other depending on the situation or need. The situation may even have changed across generations.

As always, be careful what you assume. Just because your ancestors were from France doesn't mean they spoke French. They may have spoken a language like Basque, Breton, German or Flemish. Conversely, just because they are from a region where one of these languages was spoken doesn't mean they didn't speak French. You have to weigh the available evidence carefully.

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1. Kenneth MacKinnon. "Scottish Gaelic Today: Social History and Contemporary Status," in The Celtic Languages, ed. Martin J. Ball (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 491-535.

Surname Saturday - Schoendorf

Paul Schoendorf, my great-great-grandfather, settled in Cleveland, Ohio at the end of the 19th century. He came from a village outside Gersheim, which is now in the German state of Saarland, near the border with France. The name Schoendorf has a number of features that are very typical of German names. Words and names are often long and complex in German. However, by breaking words into their parts it can be easy to discover the meaning of a name. In turn, this my give clues to the origins of your family.

The name Schoendorf can be easily broken into two parts. The first part of the name comes from the adjective schön, meaning "beautiful". The second part of the name is the German word Dorf, which means "village". It is a common element in many German place names, perhaps most famously in the city of Düsseldorf. And, because it is common in place names, it has also become common in surnames, as in the name of the founder of Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York. Together, the meaning of Schoendorf is the somewhat generic "beautiful village".

The Umlaut
You may have noticed that the word for beautiful in German has the letter O with two dots written above it (ö). This character is usually referred to as an "O with umlaut". The name Schoendorf would also be written with this symbol in a German-speaking country. So, when looking in German databases, it may be necessary to type the name as "Schöndorf". When the umlaut character is unavailable, instead of simply dropping the two dots, the letter is written with a following E. This is also a very common convention that has been followed by many German immigrants when adapting names. For example, the very common German name of Müller is often found as Mueller. If you have a name, which you think is German, that has vowels "oe", "ue" and "ae", you may want to consider substituting these vowel pairs for the vowel with umlaut, "ö", "ü" and "ä". You may find something new this way. If you are going to type these characters a lot, you may want to look into the keyboards settings on your computer. If not, it is easy to produce these symbols in Microsoft Word. Simply type ctrl + shift + ; and then type the desired vowel. You can then copy and paste where needed.