 Hello, everyone. How are you? Hello. Kathy's on the move a bit. Well, I'm sitting next to the window and it's kind of getting the glare, so I'm trying not to be so bright, but I don't know. If you just stick a halo behind your head, it'll be fine. There we go. That's a little better. There you go. Christine, you don't have your brick wall behind you today. You must have broken down your brick wall. Oh my goodness, if only. And we have Elf, Danny Gutnach back with us again today. Hello. Hi there, Danny. How are you doing? I'm fine. Thank you. That's good. Back by popular demand. In case, we're very excited to have you back. I'm going to quickly put a link for those who wanted to see the first appearance of Danny when he helped us out with the third day of Elf. He shared a number of links and did a great job. Danny has now made G to G post for each of the days of Elfness. Starting the first, the second, and the third one yesterday. So I'm going to give you the link to that third day of Elfness. Don't go and watch it right now. Watch it afterwards. You can cue it up in your browser. But in the G to G post, you'll see some links that Danny shared with us yesterday about some of the German research he had done then. Again, there you go. She must have dropped her phone or something. I was going to check the comments and I hit the leave button by accident. Oh, yes. We've all done that. Oh, that's good. Welcome, everyone who's here, who's watching us live and those who are watching us after the fact. We're glad to have you here. We're on the fourth day of Elfness. And if you're not sure what this is as wiki tree, of course, we have a free website for genealogists where genealogists collaborate. And we have a two week challenge, a secret Santa challenge where elves who have signed up wiki tree elves have signed up to help their fellow wiki tree elves solve different problems or fulfill wishes that they've had. Many of them brick walls are other challenges. And so we're profiling a different wish each day. And today is the fourth day of Elfness. And as always, we start with a little verse of the song. On the fourth day of Elfness, a good elf gave to me. Fourth great-grandma's parents. At one point I will sing all the verses. Maybe starting tomorrow with the five golden rings. We will do all five. We will keep on and do the whole song. But for today it's just fourth great-grandma's parents. Just looking at the comments here, Greg, Stephen Tomasiewicz was asking if there's a page showing all the requests. I don't know if we have a link to the... to the elf page. But yes, there is an enormous list of over 350 wishes on the elf page. Yes. And in fact, so here is the page that I was talking about. There's the post that Aowyn did. Thank you, Aowyn, for doing this for us. This is amazing. Doesn't that look nice? Except for that ugly face in the middle of it there. But look how nicely it's structured. There's the wish link to Danny's page. Those are the resources he shared. And then you can go back and forth to that. And then there's of course the link to the YouTube. But don't click that link yet. Watch this video first and then go and watch the other one. But if you go to the G2G forum itself, there's the link to the wishes accepted. So if you click on that, Stephen, you can see all the wishes that people have made and so on. And if you're interested, we're revealing one per day. And so you're going to have to wait until the last day, the 12th day of Elfmas, which is going to be Saturday, January the 6th. And on that day, we'll have the grand epiphany and reveal all the wishes that have been resolved at that point. So you can join us then and then find out all the good things. But back to let's focus on day four and Christine, would you like to read the wish since the person who made the wish isn't able to be with us tonight. He's working a night shift and so is not available. So our wish came from Oliver Stegen, who's also a member of the German project. And he said, Dear Santa, who are the parents of my fourth great-grandmother, Juditha Zugwurst. She was born in Schloss Wippeck and there are more people with that, with the last name at birth of Zugwurst in other sources from that village like on Jedbus. But at this stage, she is the only Zugwurst on wicketry and no ancestors or siblings have been identified. Thanks for any clues I may guess, Christmas. That was from Oliver. So good reading there. Christine, how'd you do, Danny, with the Zugwurst? I didn't realize how many Zugwursts were in that. It was very close, yes. I'm having flashbacks of getting told by Chris Ferriero on how to say that little place that he researches and gives it right now. No, it's in the States. Yes, Haverle. It's not spelled Haverle, but it's pronounced Haverle. So here is the profile of the fourth great-grandmother and you can see those of the parents that have been added. And siblings too, yes. Were those new? Did you add those as well, Danny? Yeah, yeah. Easy peasy, right? So look at this lovely profile that Danny has put together. And just like when you watch yesterday's or if you were here yesterday he's got the facts and of course a pure translation from the original documents. So it's very, it's so nicely done. And yesterday Danny was able to take us through the whole process of getting to the baptismal record. And today, what are you going to show us today, Danny? Yeah, let's start with finding where Schloss Bippach is. You need to know where to look for, if you're looking for the records of course. And Germany is a kind of mess in territories, as you can see. Mm-hmm. My first look at this and I think that's an abstract painting. How can that be a map? Yeah, luckily the she already knew where the mother came from. Don't know exactly where he knew it from. But at least he had a guess and he looked obviously in other online pages to find this last name of hers. And seemed to have find the connection to Schloss Bippach. I actually checked it again because you have always to be sure. Actually we can use one of the nice links from yesterday if you want. This name DistributionMap. Okay, and that was the DistributionMap right here, right? Oh no, not the first one. There we go. And if you try to find, like on the Kleimanhagen then it goes away. Oh, it goes away. Okay, there we go. So that we don't have too much gots there. Yeah, that's right. So then you can see how many there are. Are there any? Oh, is that those little green jets in Thuringia? Oh my. In the middle of Thuringia we have two hits and even if you click the 1996 this is a later version then you see they have expanded a bit. Go crazy. Wow. But actually they kind of stayed in the same area. So you can be sure that if you find the Tsukwost somewhere in the world they are related to each other most likely. Wow. So Schloss Bippach I just start to look and the profile didn't have anything else, just a guest year of birth and the husband that she should have. The husband is what's called Schatz or so I think. So this is something you can work with and then you have to find out where to look for and then you need to have to go to the map of the area of course and this is where we start after presentation. You can see it. Again, Danny has put together, now he's actually put together a whole PDF here which we're actually going to go through and he's willing to share it with us. So I'll put the link to that in our comments here. For all that wants some nice modern art. You want some modern art, there you go. You can hang that up and have it framed on your wall. But especially later on you get to see some of the you might need to zoom in on your own device at some point later. But anyway. I think the map really illustrates what Danny was saying yesterday about how all of the territories were broken up but they still belong to each other. Yeah. Everything that has the same color here at this page belongs together. Actually the purple thing is the Archbishop Brick of Mainz as you can see. So there's this one here. If you look for Schloss Wippach in Wikipedia and you should always go to German Wikipedia because it's more accurate and more detailed. You can anyway translate it online. Down here too. All of those purple places. Yes. If you look the left most purple things it has the city of Mainz already. Oh there it is. This is the main seat of the Archbishop Brick and all these other territories he or not only one but during the history he managed to claim or get on another way. I don't know. Right. And so he was also getting possession of the city of Erfurt. Which is over here. Yeah and then there was this count of Wippach who sold his territory to the city of Erfurt in 3087 as you can see. Erfurt belonged to the Bishop Brick of Mainz and so it belongs also Schloss Wippach belonged to the Archbishop Brick of Mainz. And then you see the list how it goes through the history. It became in the Napoleonic wars. It was conquered by the French and Napoleon obviously claimed it for himself because Erfurt was a very rich city at that time. And then after the war was over and Napoleon defeated then it was just actually it was given to Prussia I think but they changed it with the Grand Duchy of Saxe Weimar Eisenach to get some other territories that were closer to their territory. Yeah and then it goes through the North German Confederation and then it became part of the German Empire till the end of the Second World War and then it became part of the eastern part of Germany the German Democratic Republic and since 1998 it belongs to Turingia so Turingia is not that old as you can see. Is that the pink here? At this time it also was called Turingia but it was only a land gradient and it was occupied by Saxony shortly after this map was... Anyways as you can see we have to look in the vicinity of Erfurt and if you are doing your research in Germany you might already know that it is in the archives of Saxony or Turingia as it is now and also on Arschion you can find it if you know where to look for. So this I was looking for and then you can go back to the first go back to the profile and then you can see that I found also the marriage records so this proves that this is the right person and then you can look for the birth record and so on and then you can go back in time and if you are lucky they are there forever. Like the distribution map suggested that they are not traveled much around and stayed in this nice little area. And so look how far you got. So you got not only her parents which was the wish but you went back four generations and actually I did this mostly because for today we wanted to show some examples for the handwriting that I have to deal with. It is one thing to find the records and it is another level to read them then as we will see shortly and so I went through the books as far back as I could find them. It is more difficult Danny. Sorry are the maternal the mother's lines are they more difficult to do? No actually not. No I just wanted to stay with this one name for now. Actually as you can see and I am maybe it is a little bit difficult. The mother of the wishes at the starting point she is also from Schloss Wirbach so it should be easy to go in the same book and then get on her line back as far as the other but the grandmother you can see she comes from another town it is the same territory but another town so you have to look and I did not do this yet what books are there and how far they go back and if you are lucky you will find them. Also the grandmother you see is from another so the next generation one up also from another village it is from Frondorf but it looks like the father's state the Zugwurst line itself is consistent. It is from the same territory so it is not far away but it is another parish so you will have to find another book the Schloss Wirbach books they are kind of sorted together so it is easy to go back. If you have one book then you have also the others in our units quite good sorted. Nice. So then I would say let's start with some theory of German handwriting. Okay so we found the records can we read them? You can see that the German handwriting is not the same as the Latin it is close and some letters actually are the same they are very close and there are some letters that are completely different like the little E and the little N. What is the difference between the E, the little E and the little N? It is not so tight together you see it is more stretched the little N is more stretched. That is the only difference is it stretched a little bit? Oh my goodness. So this is why these strikes are always important in the handwriting. And then German language also has this other little letters that not all languages have so-called umlauts. And then these nice combinations which allowed in the end for instance this is the first one. It's actually a C and an H. So is this one CL? No this is CK. Now I do. This one I guessed was TH. And then comes an SCH. You might know actually this is this double S sound. It's like a double S sound. In modern language we try to avoid it and use the double S actually but for some words because they would change the meaning if you do that we still have to keep it. Is that the one that looks sort of like a beta symbol? Exactly. I did not know that. That is so cool. And the last one is an ST. So the double S has a bit of a loop there at the end? Yes. So you see it can be very difficult. And if you are lucky then you find something like I put there in the right. This is a letter actually. And this is a nice written letter. So if you have this list you can just you can just compare it. And then you might be able to decipher it. And then of course you have to know the German language because reading is one thing and understanding is the other. But this would be really nice if everyone would have written this way. But you know every writer has his own handwriting and some are more careful and some are just in a hurry I would say. And then it looks much worse. I think if you go to the next slide we can see an example already. Sure. There we go. Oh my. This is the Tofa der Johanna. Is this her baptism? Can you see it Danny? I'm on the 1802. It's the parish register. And this is what Danny was talking about yesterday. The record that we were looking at yesterday was in the columns. But how they go into such a description about the child who was born and then the first child and little daughter of the master Bricklayer. Johanna, George. Where the 1219 is, that's where the beginning of the entry. Exactly, this is the beginning. So she was born on the 19th. So is the 12 just like the record in order? You have to look up on the top of the bench then you will have some hints. So that would be like the 12. They counted the boys in the first column then they counted the girls in the second and the total number is in the third. So actually in this year it's the 19th child that's baptized and it's the 12th girl. Of course you only see this if you have the total page. But you can see it's hard actually. This is one of the better ones and then you also have the problem that in the old old papers sometimes the ink from the reverse page comes through and then you have you can see that but it's not strong enough that it just looks like a shaded background in this case. There are worse cases. Sometimes they use very bad ink that eats through the paper with time so you have holes in it instead of a script. This is one of the better books that I found. Then you go just back and back and if you have the baptism record then you can think that the parents must have married before some years or and then you go just back in time and look for the you have the parents names here and then you look for the marriage of this this guy's and then I found them in 1794 and then you'll see it changes the wider chains then also the script chains and the style he writes and the things that he writes down. That one was left handed. I think that one was left handed. I recognize that. Then he also the more you go back in time then the people will have used still more Latin words in it. Like the ones I put there you have to know the abbreviations of this. Here it starts also that they still use the old church calendar. If you find in the text some DOM you can always be sure that he uses the old because the old church calendar works not like we do it now with dates and months or days and months. It just counted the Sundays throughout the year and gave them special names and then they would just say it was on the Wednesday after the Sunday after Trinity for instance. It was on Friday after the third Sunday after Easter. Everyone would go to church on Sunday and that would be your keystone. You just had to count up to 7 days afterwards to keep track of where you weren't. When did we start printing calendars? When did we start? That's really cool. Then you have the marriage and then you can calculate back. So maybe 30 but not much younger and not much older. Then you can look for the for instance you also have hints for the parents and then you can just go back. You will find another writer with another handwriting so you will have to adapt your skills again. I like this guy better than the last one. The symbols for the days of the week. You might find strange signs in it sometimes. In the fourth line of the transcript you have this sign that looks like a 2 and 4 combined. This is not a 24 or something. Some people use this as a number and then of course you will get the wrong date. You have to know that they also had signs for the different days of the week. It's given here in German. You will get the point. I think it's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and so on. Everyone every day has his own sign and they just use it. So this 4 is just Thursday in this case. You might find the others also sometimes. Then you can transcribe and then of course you have to translate it. Then you can just calculate if you have the baptism. Now the parents would have got married also. You have the parents' names here and then you go back and just find them. Of course you will have to go through the book. There is no index so you will have to read the whole of the book. If you are lucky they are underlined the family names so that you can concentrate only on the family names. This is why I just concentrated on the 2 course part now. If you have it in your mind then you will find it faster. There is that little swoop above the U. This is indicating that this is a U exactly. Not an N. You will find some of the abbreviations that we already had but you have also some new ones. Now we come to a part that not even Germans will be able to read it because the language changed. This is all German now and we don't use these words anymore. No one is saying violent anymore. There are much words that you don't find nowadays so you also have to look in the dictionary or in the old dictionary actually. It's like they almost make a judgement call of the people. A former well respected citizen here. You will often find such things. The more interesting things are the ones that are not so holy persons. For marriage for instance then the priest tends to write a lot of things in the entry. For them it might not have been so good but for us it's of course more interesting if we find more details. It's like a nice gossip that we hear now. That's right. Another generation. Here is the case that there is kind of water damage on the book because books are very old now. It's fading there on that side. A lot of things happened to the books since then. And then of course you would have to fill in the blanks or just guess. This is one of the better examples. Luckily you have the word split in part here and you have the first half on the right side still and then you can guess what is coming. You also see that it's more common to use the old church calendar again. He used also the Latin numbers for the month here. This is in Rome in 12. After the 20, so it's December. There. You cannot see it very well. It could well be also a 15 but it wouldn't make sense. Since he used both conventions even if he used the Roman form. But then he repeats it again by saying it was Wednesday, post the third Sunday. Sunday after the advent. This would be a nice point. I have another nice page for you. Let's see. I will put it in the chat. This is in German but you will probably... Okay, let me just transfer that over. I don't know why does it say opens in a news tab. My copy and paste copy. How's that? Does that work for people? Yeah. Let me open it up here. It opens a new tab. This is a calculator for the old calendar. You would just put in the year in question and let's take this example. What was the year? Then it gives you a list of all the Sundays in this year and on the right side it has the common date. Then you can scroll down and look what the third Sunday was. It would be the 17th December and then you have to come forward until you come to Wednesday. Then you would have the 20th of December. Even if you are not able to read this in the text because it's just double down, you can look if you are correct. The further you go back then you will not have this second or the common date with the day and the month. You only have this Wednesday after Sunday. Then you are very reliable on this calendar here. This is also important to know that Holy Roman Empire didn't change the calendar from the Julian calendar system to Julian until 1700. If you before 1700 you will also have to deal with the Julian calendar system. You just have to keep that in mind. It's for the territory that it's now Germany. Then I think we have only one or two examples left. You also have the day, the common calendar. Then you have also this Sunday after the 24th post-Trinity. 24th Sunday of ordinary time. There we go. You don't have to be confused if you find this Roman numbers. Is that a day of the week? No, this is actually because if you look in the translation below, it says that there was a wedding ceremony held. Oh, I forgot it, I see. I didn't put it in the translation. It actually says where the text for the wedding ceremony came from. It's a Bible citation and this is the Greek sea letter. I think it's meant to mean that this is from the Psalter. Psalm 51 that they used for this ceremony. Yeah, you also will find such unexpected signs sometimes. To me it looks like a fermata, like a pause in music with a 44 underneath it. I think that's just record 44. Is it record 44? That's record 44. There's the 43 here. He makes just this stroke above it so that he can... kind of... So then you have here the marriage and then if you're lucky you can go back, have the baptism. And you see it becomes shorter and shorter. This is another priest now writing and he was a little bit lazy. Sometimes you don't have much. Actually he also doesn't mention the... Was it here? No, he doesn't mention the mother. You just have the father by name. So if you want to know the mother you have to find the wedding. But you have another tsukvost here because the brother of the father obviously stood as godparent here. Great. And then if you go back again then you will find the marriage finally. Because now they even didn't underline it so it's hard to see. There's the tsukvost there I think. But at least it mentions the full name of the mother. Which is also not... Michael Tsukvost got married and then you were left alone with this. But to who? Janne, I noticed that in that one record his last name Tsukvost was written with an e-an on the end of it. This is another good question that I have to work on. This is something you have always to keep in mind if you translate or transcribe German church book entries. Because the German language has grammatical cases and the cases are expressed in endings. The genitive ending. The text goes about the son that belongs to the father and so you would have the genitive form of the father's name. And then you have to add this e-an. And this is not part of the name. It's still tsukvost. It's just because it's put in another grammatical case. But it's not part of the name. Greg, if you go forward one slide again. And then in this one, her last name. You have this e-an ending. This is also something that does actually not belong to the name. It's just used for the female version of the name. You can have both genders in the name and in German it is like if you want to express that something has the female gender you have to put the in. We do this also with occupations for instance. It's not part of the name. I see this very often. That it becomes part of the name and then if you search for it you will not find the right name. And in this case it's even worse because of this ending. Sometimes the stem of the word shifts in pronunciation. And this results in the umlaut to come into play. Oh, really? So this is also not part of the actual name. It's just a grammar thing. As I translated it below. So this is her actual name. Also the double f is a doubling that is due to Neyar. It was kind of a thing at this time. It happened very often that they doubled the consonants at the end. And it happened especially if you put an ending in it. So you have to know all this otherwise you will produce a new name. And then of course you have no chance. If you look for this name as it is written in, you will just not, you can try it on this nice name. I think it will pop up empty. So if we did land graph and now it doesn't matter whether I put an accent there or not? It doesn't matter. This is worse enough. Actually you have some. No, no, you just have to delete the other ones. I have to get rid of the other ones, right? So you have no blue dots as you can see. No red dots there. No, but if I do land graph. It's the double f thing. Now the problem is the double f because it's also just grammar. There we go. Bingo. So this is actually a nice tool to check the spelling. So if you do the names correct. This is what we would have to put in for the last name of birth, the land graph. Exactly. You can have it in the transcription because it's part of the language. It's written like this in German. So you have to recreate the real name. Otherwise you can see you will turn out empty with every search you do. Just by putting in this female ending it will ruin your search experience. Wow. Well, this is a wonderful document you share with us with all these examples in the translations and whatnot. Hola. Has a question. How do you save the documents in Wikitree? So let's see. If I go back to the... Let's hide that. So you have under sources you've added the link to the... Actually, yeah, this is the link to Archeon which most are only on Archeon. For many years we had a problem with the Evangelical Church here in Germany because they didn't want to put them or digitize them at all. At least they put them online to be available for everyone. So it was a long discussion. Archeon page and saved it there. But it's a pay side unfortunately. This was the compromise we had to take. So it's not easy for someone who doesn't have a subscription to get to these documents. This is why I actually transcribe it or translate it. It's for English in the Scandant. So that you have it there and don't need to go there but if you want to check it then the link is also there. You'll see the way he's formatted the source links there. All the things you need to know which book to look in, which years, which image number. So that's very helpful. But I love that you've translated it here and put it included as part of the bios so that all the details that are on the record you can verify. Sometimes it's helpful for instance if you have the godparents because if you don't find the marriage record then the wedding took place most likely in the place where the pride came from and if you don't know that because it's not written in the entry or so then you will not be able to find anything of her line. But if they stayed after the marriage in the place where the husband came from and they got their children there and they got baptized there then you have for all the children you will find the baptism record and for all the children you will also find the godparents there and since they usually were picked from close relatives let's say the brothers and sisters of the parents then you can just see if there is some brother or sister from the mother and if they are there in the entry then most likely it's also mentioned where they came from and then you have a clue where to look for the place where the mother came from. So this is the important thing that you already have to know everything what's in the entry and not just the date and the name. Well that's great you've done a wonderful job Danny and just fantastic so Oliver sent a message because he knew he couldn't be here but he wanted to say well thank you for the invite so I'd love to join on your everybody at Cap to Work give my heartfelt greetings to Elf, Danny and all the other subordinate clauses. Again he's a linguist by trade so that's his terminology for Santa's Helper Santa Claus and all the subordinate clauses best in genealogical wishes from Germany, Oliver Thank you. Yeah very nice that was wonderful wow what a nice mini lesson was thanking us for the mini lesson well this is I think it's more than just a mini lesson this is a great two-day tour we've had of German records something that I had not delved into so I'm not quite sure I'm ready to yet but at least I have a history, geography and language all in one lesson. Oh I know we've got a whole school this is what I needed in high school. We start with music class every class starts with the music oh anyways well thank you everyone who's stuck with us all this time actually we've gained people we haven't lost people we've actually gained people on the stream that's amazing tomorrow we will have the fifth day of Elfmas and the lifecast for that the Elfcast for that will be at 12 noon tomorrow at 10am eastern time will be the regular Saturday round up and you'll get to see me and Megs and Betsy and all our regular shenanigans but then at 12 noon eastern time or 5pm UTC time or various other time zones in between that we will have our fifth day of Elfmas and that'll be a lot of fun too so we're looking forward to that again Danny I'd like to thank you for all your hard work and you're solving these two wishes that we've profiled but you've been doing lots of work with other people's wishes as well and all of our Elves have been doing a great job so thank you all and we will see you and we'll see you tomorrow