Once you begin to research your family history, you eventually reach the point where decisions have to be made about the scope of your research. Many people will initially choose a particular side of the family to study, others may decide to research one surname, such as that of their father's heritage. My brother and I made no such determination, deciding that we would research both sides of our parent's lineage. I'm not sure if we ever considered how big of a job that might become, but regardless, we were interested in our entire heritage.
Fast forward several months. Beyond our initial decision to study all branches of our family, there are still other perhaps less obvious choices that need to be made. One being how far back do you go? Courtesy of Ancestry.com's most generous introductory gift of free access to their premium content, and one-click access to several generations of lineage at a pop, in one night I managed to take one line of my family tree all the way back to the middle ages. Imagine my surprise to find that I'm descended from Charlemagne, "Charles the Great", King of the Franks, and Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire?
Yeah, that's right, Charlemagne (shown), and his son Louis I "the Pious", King of the Franks, and Hnabi Duke of Alemannia, his daughter Imma von Swabia, Charles "The Bald", and a bunch of other names that I thought were just characters in Fairy Tales that I read about when I was a kid. To be honest, I was amused at these findings, but also highly skeptical as to whether or not this lineage was accurate. I also wondered if it was even possible to verify such information. Since making this discovery, I have spent a bit of time trying to validate it by other sources, but the truth is that I'm really much more interested in more recent history, as in post Magna Carta.
Personally, I have a very strong interest in the American Civil War, and in general, learning how my ancestors fit into the American Experience. While I'm not dis-interested in my lineage back to the dark ages in Europe, I had decided not to focus much of my time and energy on taking my family lines back that far. Besides, 19th century American history is challenging enough for the beginning genealogist.
Still, I had to make a decision just where to draw the line. The obvious choice, considering my stated focus on American history, was with immigration to the new world. Not only does that mark the starting point for my American heritage, but also includes the opportunity to discover fun facts about the immigration of my ancestors. I get to ask (and hopefully answer) questions like, did I have any relatives on the Mayflower, or, were any of my ancestors at Jamestown? Perhaps there are even future blog posts along those lines (hint hint).
There is however another interesting thing I noticed about family history that tended to occur within some proximity in time to the act of immigration. That is the change of spelling of surnames. Sometimes that would occur at the time of, or after immigration, but I noted that it also was fairly common to see spelling changes take place a generation or more prior to ancestors emigrating from the "old country". In the case of the Anglo heritage, I've described this phenomenon as the transition from "Old English" to a more modern interpretation of our language. These cases seem the most relevant for me, but I've noticed similar spelling transitions with French and Dutch/German surnames as well. I decided that this phenomenon was not only interesting, but potentially valuable in genealogical terms. Therefore I decided that it was worthwhile to research family lines back to the time of immigration, and then beyond that for a generation or so to see if I could identify specifics of surname transition.
So this all brings me closer to the point of the article. Please bare with me, there is a destination here, and I think you'll find it worthwhile (at least I did, which is why I'm writing this). As I wrote in my last piece, I had started my family research with a folder of various materials that my parents had collected over the years. One item in that
folder was a transcription of the Naturalization document for my great grandfather, Nicholas Baetz (shown). According to a family account, he immigrated to this country from Germany, solo, in 1884. His fiance, Elizabeth Franz, emigrated from Germany the following year with Nicholas' sister Kathrine. Nicholas and Elizabeth were married in Kansas and had 12 children, of which my grandfather William Carl was one. Back to the Naturalization document, which is dated September 15, 1892 in the Fifteenth Judicial District of the State of Kansas. My grandfather is listed in that document as Nicholas Batz. At the time when I first saw this, I dismissed it as a typo, or some artifact of the likelihood that my great grandfather probably didn't speak English that well, and perhaps spelled English even worse than he spoke it.
Now, more recently, I had the great fortune to meet (via email and post), a distant Baetz relative by the name of Barbara Wilson. The way that we crossed paths is another blog post of it's own, so I'll save that for later. But in any event, she had been involved with Baetz genealogy for some time, and was good enough to share with me much of what she has collected over the years. Lo and behold, most of what she sent me indeed listed the spelling of my great grandfather's name as Nicholas Batz. Actually, Nicolaus Batz in some cases, to be precise. This spelling was quite prevalent,
and included in these materials were photocopies of actual documents, including the Naturalization document I referred to previously. I inquired with Barbara if she knew what was up with the spelling, and she replied simply that 'Batz' was the German spelling, and that Nick was likely the one who changed it here in this country as it showed up in the census as 'Baetz'.
At this point, I'm really scratching my head over this. Keep in mind, I don't speak German, and have never taken any
German language courses in my entire life. Most, in fact, all of the instances I've seen previously of changes in the spelling of surnames involved the simplification of the spelling. I like to call it the "Americanization" of surnames. Never had I seen a surname changed to a more difficult spelling or pronunciation. Until now. Because 'Baetz' is more complicated than 'Batz', or 'Betz', is it not? How do you pronounce 'Baetz'? We pronounce it like 'Betz', so why isn't it spelled that way? Because, well, I think it's obvious by now based on the title where this article is going. Enter into the record the shown document as evidence. I don't know exactly what it is as I haven't had it translated yet. If there are any German speaking readers, please drop me a line if you can help. I took a closer look at this document, and it sure looks like there is an umlaut over the a in the spelling of great granddad's surname.
At this moment, it all fell into place, but I did a bit of research on A-umlaut in the German language. I started with my favorite on-line encyclopedia, wikipedia, and found everything I needed to know, including this line:
In other languages that do not have the letter as part of the regular alphabet or in limited character sets such as US-ASCII, A-umlaut is frequently replaced with the two-letter combination "ae".
Well, there you have it. The English translation for 'Bätz' is 'Baetz'. Case solved. It turned out that my great grandfather Nicolaus knew a great deal more about English spelling than I gave him credit for. And he didn't even have wikipedia to lean on.
