This week the post is brief, as we have a 16 year-old celebrating her birthday, and we are getting things ready for friends, food and fun. The week’s theme is Translation, and I will add a some records that required many rereads, zooming in and out, posts in foreign language and paleography boards, and the help of the almighty Google.
One interesting ancestor record I have is the marriage between my 4th great-grandfather Peter Joseph Schneider and his first wife, Gertrud Schaeffer, celebrated in Weierweiler, Saarland, Germany, on 25 Feb 1808. The region was historically German-speaking, but had been annexed as part of the French Republic in 1792. Civil registration followed the rules and regulations of the Napoleonic Code and lasted until 1815, producing records written in French. Gertrud was a widow when she married Peter, and passed away in June of 1811. Later on that same year, Peter married my fourth great-grandmother Eva Klossen, you can see that other record, too.
By the time my third great-grandfather Nicolaus Schneider was born on 4 Sep 1820, the German language and the typeface had made a return. Fraktur characters are very aesthetically pleasing, but hard to read.
Peter Joseph would later have documents written in another foreign language. He became a widower for the second time on 16 Oct 1837. He did not have any children with the first wife, but had six with Eva. Of those, four immigrated to Brazil along with the father in 1846, receiving plots of land in the Colony of Santa Isabel in my home state of Espírito Santo.