Finding School Land Records

I was on a business trip to Oklahoma City last week, and my meeting ended at 3:30.  Since it wasn't yet 5:00, I decided to do a bit of genealogy at the Oklahoma State Archives.

According to a snippet of a 1913 plat map that my aunt gave me, my great-grandmother Eva (Pauls) Suderman Richert (1859-1920) leased school land in Kiowa County, Oklahoma, in 1913.  Since she leased land, I am unlikely to find any land records in the Kiowa County courthouse.  But there is another source - the records of the Commissioners of the Land Office, which administers the school lands, are located at the Oklahoma State Archive.  I had found this little bit of knowledge on the Oklahoma Historical Society web page, and added it to my to-do list for Eva Pauls.  (BTW, the J. P. Richert who leased the adjoining quarter became her second husband in 1914).

Eva Sudermann, Lessee, Portion of Plat Map, Harrison Township, Kiowa County, Oklahoma, 1913.  Original held by Viola (Fast) Funk of Corn, Oklahoma.

Once my meeting ended, I headed off to the State Archives, which is located in the Oklahoma Department of Libraries in Oklahoma City.

As is typical in my experience, the archival staff were a bit skeptical when I came in and asked for the school land records from Kiowa County for the 1910s.  But once they realized that I wasn't the kind of genealogist who comes in and asks them to give me everything about my great-grandmother, they became more friendly.

There are scores of volumes of school land records, with copies of leases, lists of every tract leased, lists of every payment received, and many other records.  I picked a few volumes that I thought might give me a record for Eva Suderman.  None of the records were indexed or alphabetical, so I quickly realized that the fastest way to search for her land was to scan the legal description column for the township number 7 (her legal description was NE quarter of section 34, township 7 north, range 16 west or NE4 34-7-16).

I didn't find any lease records for Eva Suderman, but I did find a lease record for her future husband Jacob Richert (she was a widow at the time as her first husband Jacob Suderman, my great-grandfather, was deceased).  But it's a lease for the SE quarter of section 25, not the NW quarter of section 35 that he is shown leasing in the map above, so I don't know what to make of that.

Jacob P. Richert, Lessee, 16 December 1909, School Land Lease Records, 1902-1910, 3 vol., p. 307-308, Record Group 3 Records of the Commissioners of the Land Office, State of Oklahoma.  Held by Oklahoma State Archives, Department of Libraries, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

At 5:00 it was time to close up, so I reluctantly had to leave.  There were still a lot of volumes that I had not looked at.  Maybe sometime I'll be able to go back to Oklahoma City and finish the research, so I noted the volumes that I had searched and my meager results so that I won't repeat the same work next time.

I didn't get any results for Eva Sudermann, but at least I did prove the concept.  Now I know how to find Oklahoma school land records, I know there are lots of detailed records, and I can expect that other states have similar records in some repository somewhere.  Although it was a bit disappointing, I did gain some experience.

Training Seminar on Deciphering German Texts

I'll be doing a training seminar at Tabor College's Center for Mennonite Brethren Studies on deciphering printed and handwritten German texts.

Date - 5 November 2016
Time - 10am
Place - Library Conference Center, Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kans.

Here's the link with the details to RSVP.

Teach Yourself to Read German Script (Part IV)

If you've been keeping up with our series on learning to read German script, you learned to form the letters and write words (Part I), transcribe some clearly-written German script (Part II), and translate some printed German text (Part III).  For this part, we'll show how to translate handwritten German texts.


For hard translations I like to work on paper because I can write individual words or letters on the original as I decipher them next to the word or sentence.  I'll describe the process that way, but most of it could be done on a computer.

I like to lay the original text out along with two blank sheets of paper.  If there is room, I will write a transcription of the German text in Latin letters on a copy of the original.  The first blank sheet of paper is to re-create the scribe's alphabet, and the second blank sheet is to write the English translation.

Re-creating the scribe's alphabet is a crucial step, something that professional paleographers do.  Write the Latin alphabet down the side of the page - as you work through the text, write the examples of how the scribe makes the letters, both capital and small, on the page.  If he makes them a few different ways, write all the variants that you find.  This will help you recognize letters in tough words.

Scribal alphabet that I recreated for a translation.

Now work through the text from the beginning, writing German words in Latin letters above the original script.  Each time you decipher a new letter, write it on your alphabet page.  As you start to get words, look them up and write the English on your translation page and start to massage them into English sentences.  If you just can't get a word, write down the letters that you do know and leave the rest blank for now.  Professional paleographers work letter-by-letter on tough translations, and you should too.  I usually have to go through a text several times before I get most or all of the words.  Sometimes I never get all the words and have to guess at the meaning of a sentence.

Finally, quality check your work.  Read it to make sure the English is smooth and sounds like native English and not a mechanical translation.  Think about whether each sentence makes sense in the context - if you have made a translation mistake, then a word or the whole sentence often won't fit the context.  If you know a German speaker, you could ask him to review your transcribed text to see if you got the translation right.

Here's a sample transcription that I did of a West Prussian land document where my 5-greats-grandfather Gerhard Fast (1739-1828) was a mayor of a village in 1782 and affirmed the veracity of a real estate contract.

Source:  Act on Land Sale from Arnd Warkentien to Peter Engbrecht, Actum Elbing beij den Stadtgericht [Act of Elbing at the City Court], 10 January 1782, Lit. D. No. 10, Neustadter Ellerwald, Pages 2-3 from Neustaedterwald Grundbuch Blatt 10, State Archives of Malbork, Poland, Fond 502, File 1623. Found at http://mla.bethelks.edu/archives/VI_53/Malbork/Neustaedterwald/Neustaedterwald%20Blatt%2010%20Malbork%20Archives%20Fond%20502%20File%201623/IMG_0280.JPG on 26 November 2014.

And here is my final translation.  Notice that I have several words that I couldn't read for sure (e.g. insonderheit) and some that are not standard 21st-century German words (e.g. Leud instead of Leute for people).  This is simply a reality when you are translating old texts.  But I hope that this translation demonstrates that someone who starts with no knowledge of German can, with persistence and practice, translate a moderately difficult text.

I had planned to add some exercises with texts to translate of increasing difficulty, but this post has been in the draft box for far too long.  I suggest that you take some of your own German texts and work on translating them.  Start with some easier ones and work up to harder ones. 

Good luck and let us know in a comment how you are progressing.

Teach Yourself to Read German Script (Part III)

Once you've practiced transcribing some real German script (see Part II), you're ready to start deciphering the meaning.  In a real translation, transcribing the text and translating it is an iterative process - you'll go back and forth between translating what you have transcribed and using the already-translated words to help you transcribe words you couldn't decipher before.  But I've broken it into two parts for ease of learning.  Here we will focus on the translation of printed text to make it easier.

Leave enough room between your lines of German transcription to write a word-for-word translation of English above it.  Once you understand a sentence or a paragraph, you can massage it into good English and write or type it on a separate page.

Nouns, verbs, and adjectives are usually fairly easy to translate.  (It certainly helps to know some grammar, but it's not essential.)  You look them up in a dictionary and can get an English equivalent.  Words may have several related meanings, and initially you may not know which meaning fits in your sentence, so you may write several meanings for one word until you figure out the whole sentence.  Online dictionaries I like are Reverso and LEO, but there are many out there.  If you want a physical dictionary, Oxford-Duden is a good one; but I find that I rarely use it because it is so much easier to look up words online.

These are dictionaries of modern German, but the language we will be reading is a century or two old, so there will be archaic words and expressions.  Plus our ancestors wrote a High German that was influenced by Low German and by Russian, so pay special attention to the meanings that are marked as "obsolete" or "dialect" when doing your translation.

It's also helpful to have a 19th-century German-English dictionary, and G. J. Adler published the first one, A Dictionary of the German and English Languages, in the mid-1800s.  You can buy it used online, but it is not cheap.  However, Google scanned a copy, and it can be downloaded free as a PDF.  Since it is a scan, not all the pages are readable, but most are.  Adler's dictionary has helped me figure out more than one tough translation.

Ernest Thode's German-English Genealogical Dictionary is also frequently recommended, but I have not used it.  Also, Edna M. Bentz wrote If I Can, You Can Decipher Germanic Records which is cheaper and has a good glossary, as well as lots of examples of how letters are formed.  You may find yourself consulting many other dictionaries, such as legal, medical, or agricultural, when you run across a tough word, many of which are online.

What about Google Translate or other machine translators?  I find it has a role to play as an aid.  Sometimes, if I can't figure out a word or a sentence, I may try Google Translate to see what it says.  Sometimes it's right, and sometimes it's not, especially on older and less formal language.  I also like it when I have a long passage to translate and just need to get the gist of it.

Harder than the nouns, verbs, and adjectives is translating the adverbs, conjunctions, and prepositions and the endings that show verb tense and sentence structure (what linguists would call the inflection).  Reverso has a page where you can get the conjugation (past, present, future, etc.) of any German verb, which can help a lot for figuring out the meaning of a sentence.

University of Michigan has a good page on German conjunctions that can help you understand sentence structure.  And here is a page on German pronouns.

Now for some practice - here is part of the obituary of my great-great-grandfather, Jacob Fast.  First, the scan of a couple paragraphs from the Mennonitische Rundschau and then below that my English translation.  Try to translate the German and see if you can get something similar to my English translation.  BTW, translations by two different people that are equally correct will be different in wording and phrasing, so don't worry if yours is a little different than mine.

Jacob Fast, Letter to the Editor, Mennonitische Rundschau under Herold der Wahrheit, Elkhart, Indiana, 22 March 1905, p. 3.  Held by Centre for Mennonite Brethren Studies, Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Translation by Steve Fast

Next find some German documents relevant to your family and practice translating them.  It's easier to work with printed documents so that you don't have to worry about deciphering script at this point.  And working with documents from your family should motivate you to persevere as you discover new things about your ancestors.

BTW, I get mentally tired of translating after a while, sometimes 30 minutes, sometimes a couple hours.  Then I take a break and come back - often the second time around, sentences that were impossible to understand become clear.

You've got your homework - good luck!

Mennonite Historian Available Online

The September 2016 issue of the Mennonite Historian is now available online, and I have an article in it on using probate records from Saskatchewan.  Take a look.

Do You Really Need That Marriage Registration?

On 18 February 1890, my great-grandmother Aganetha (Klassen) Janzen Siemens #6465 (1848-1890) died of puerperal fever.  She left behind a grieving husband who now had to care for seven children ranging in age from newborn to twelve years.  Understandably my great-grandfather Gerhard T. Siemens #6463 (1834-1908) remarried quickly, on 13 July 1890, to a widow Maria (Peters) Rempel #7038 (1847 - 1930) in Rosenhoff, Manitoba.

The question - should I research anything about his re-marriage?  After all, this new wife was not my direct ancestor.  In fact, she's not even a collateral relative.  You do have to draw the line somewhere about what you are going to resarch, but I think this is not the place for several reasons.

First, any marriage is an important event in the life of a person.  My great-grandfather lived with Maria Peters for eighteen years before he died, so it affected him greatly that he married her.  Since my grandfather Cornelius K. Siemens was five years old when his mother died, the new wife was really the mother who raised him.  Second, it's a vital event (birth, baptism, marriage, death, burial) that I want to document for every ancestor, even if this particular marriage was not the one to which my grandfather was born.  Finally, and most importantly, there can be some critical information on the marriage registration.  So let's look at how to find the marriage registration and the details of the document.

A searchable index to Manitoba vital records, beginning in 1882, is online here.  When I searched for the marriage, this is the index entry that I found:

Gerhard Siemens and Maria Peters marriage registration index, 13 July 1890, no. 1890-001447, Vital Statistics Agency, Winnipeg, Manitoba.  Accessed online at http://vitalstats.gov.mb.ca/DetailView.php on 3 October 2016.

This gives proof of the fact of their marriage and the date.  At this point, you could be pleased with what you found and think there is no more information on the original and stop.  And sometimes you would be right.  But in this case it would be a big mistake.

For a mere 12 CAD, you can order a copy of the original, which I did.  And Saturday it showed up in my (snail) mailbox.  There were no great revelations on it, but there were some interesting facts.  First, here is the document:

Gerhard Siemens and Maria Peters marriage registration, married 13 July 1890, Rosenhoff, Manitoba, registered 4 August 1890, Vital Statistics Agency, Winnipeg, Manitoba, p. 269.

Note how much more information is on the original.  Here are some of the interesting things.

His Parents
Gerhard's parents' full names are given.  In fact, this is the only document I have found that gives his mother's maiden name, Gertruda Thiesen.   I have a church register that gives his father's wife's maiden name, but the church register doesn't say that that husband and wife are Gerhard's father or mother, so I have to use other documents to demonstrate that connection.  So this marriage registration is my only direct connection between Gerhard and his mother.

Her Parents
Maria Peters' parents were previously unknown in the Grandma database.  But here it says they are Jacob Peters and Katarina Heidebrecht.

I'm not really interested in her parents, but it might help someone else if I submit this correction to the Grandma database.

Maria Peters, #7038, Genealogical Registry and Database of Mennonite Ancestry as updated July 2016, California Mennonite Historical Society, Fresno, California.  Accessed online at http://www.grandmaonline.org/GW-asp-2/GWIndividual.asp?Ind=7038 on 3 October 2016.

No parents are listed in the screenshot above, so I submitted a correction by clicking on the button circled in red.  Of course, I searched for her parents in the database first, but I wasn't sure that I found them.  There was a Jacob Peters #53094 married to a Katharina _____ #53097 who might be her parents, but they don't have a child Maria listed in the database.  And I couldn't find that they had a child Maria in the Molotschna school records.  So I added my hunch as a note to the correction that I submitted.  Hopefully this will help some of Maria Peters' descendants someday.  (For someone who wants to pursue this family, Maria wrote a letter to the Mennonitische Rundschau that was published on 6 March 1895, in which she lists many of her relatives and either implores them for a letter or thanks them for having communicated.)

Witnesses
The two witnesses to the marriage are interesting as both are former in-laws!  Heinrich L. Friesen was the brother-in-law of Gerhard's previous wife, Aganetha Klassen.  And Jacob Rempel was the brother of Maria's previous husband.  There must not have been animosity with the in-laws since in-laws were witnesses to the marriage.  On the contrary, the in-laws likely were happy that a bereaved spouse had found a partner and someone to care for each one's children.

Minister
I have long had a question about what church Gerhard was a member of after about 1880.  He was a member of the Kleine Gemeinde to that point, but shortly after that, the KG suffered a major split where their elder and a third to a half of their members left and joined the Holdemans.  Gerhard's oldest stepson, Isaac DeVeer, did join the Holdemans, and several of his children and stepchildren joined  the Sommerfelder.  Did Gerhard leave the KG?  I haven't found any record either way until now.

But the minister who married them, Johann K. Friesen, was a KG minister according to the Grandma database (#3777), so it appears that Gerhard did not leave for the Holdemans and was still KG.

So I hope that I have demonstrated that it is worth finding the original for every marriage of your ancestors, not just the marriage between your direct ancestors.