Sometimes it seems that circumstances just conspire to make the right things happen. That's what has led to the creation of a very valuable new Max Kade Institute resource, a collection of recordings of German dialects spoken in North America.

Last year, we were alerted to the possibility of getting a large set of recordings of German-American dialects, made by Professor Wolfgang W. Moelleken over his many years of fieldwork across North America. We discussed it with Professor Moelleken, who kindly agreed to donate his collection hundreds of cassette and reel-to-reel tapes along with hundreds of notebooks, plus maps and other materials. Moelleken's materials are, by themselves, enough to create an important database for researchers, including tapes from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and eastern Canada. It includes interviews in western Virginia and West Virginia communities where Pennsylvania German was spoken for centuries, but has since died out. It also contains the only recordings we know of from Old Order Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities in several Wisconsin communities, in Clark, Taylor, Green, Rock, Monroe and Eau Claire counties.

Only hours after we had gotten nine boxes of materials from him, the family of the late Smoky Seifert came by with a mountain of Smoky's German-American dialect materials, including his original field notes from his work in Pennsylvania. More surprisingly, we found several piles of "SoundScriber" recordings, small records, made with German speakers from all around Wisconsin and beyond. We have well over 100 additional recordings already made by Jürgen Eichhoff roughly 30 years ago, a set especially rich in recordings of Pomeranian speakers from Washington and Ozaukee Counties, but containing recordings from other areas and even outside of Wisconsin.

Our students working in the field (currently in Marathon, Lincoln and Sheboygan Counties) will be adding copies of their contemporary Wisconsin German dialect tapes. In short, we suddenly have a massive and unique collection of German-American dialect recordings. Many of these dialects are no longer spoken or spoken by only very few people of very advanced age, so that these recordings could not be done today.

What now? First off, we are in the process of establishing an audio library at the MKI of German-American audio recordings, cataloguing and filing these tapes. Only when that is done will we have a complete overview of exactly what is in these piles of old tapes, cassettes, records and notebooks. Beyond that, we will need to find funds to digitize these tapes, since tape deteriorates quickly and transfer to computer is our best hope for preserving these materials in the longer term.

Our students working in the field (currently in Marathon, Lincoln and Sheboygan Counties) will be adding copies of their contemporary Wisconsin German dialect tapes. In short, we suddenly have a massive and unique collection of German-American dialect recordings. Many of these dialects are no longer spoken or spoken by only very few people of very advanced age, so that these recordings could not be done today.

What now? First off, we are in the process of establishing an audio library at the MKI of German-American audio recordings, cataloguing and filing these tapes. Only when that is done will we have a complete overview of exactly what is in these piles of old tapes, cassettes, records and notebooks. Beyond that, we will need to find funds to digitize these tapes, since tape deteriorates quickly and transfer to computer is our best hope for preserving these materials in the longer term.

"The work carried out by the Sesquicentennial Ethnic Heritage Committee and its outcome has in my opinion been a significant first step in recognizing and valuing the contributions of all ethnic groups in Wisconsin. . . . For many of the members, the Directory is not the end but the beginning of a long term commitment to address constructively race and cultural relations in Wisconsin as we approach the new millennium."

— Armando Bras, Committee Chairman

As the Wisconsin Sesquicentennial cele-bration winds down,  what will be remembered?  Will it have a lasting impact?  How can it help prepare the people of Wisconsin for a new millennium? These are some of the questions asked by the Ethnic Heritage Committee of the Sesquicentennial Commission when it began its work  two years ago.  The mission statement of the Ethnic Heritage Committee states: "[it should] ... promote the search for common bonds that allow us to celebrate our diversity, heal our differences, and create new visions to take Wisconsin into the future."
Toward these goals,  the Ethnic Heritage Committee has created an on-line, searchable database which profiles Wisconsin's many ethnic organizations.  The primary purpose of the Directory is to provide a comprehensive resource that brings together information for and about all ethnic organizations statewide.

Early in the deliberations of the Ethnic Heritage Committee, it was clear that there wasn't a way to contact the wide array of organizations around the state representing Wisconsin's many ethnic groups, but the need for one was widely felt. Indeed, the absence of such a resource was the single largest impediment to the Committee's early efforts to initiate a statewide conference which would examine ethnic settlement throughout Wisconsin historically and put it into a broader context. Not only was the necessary information lacking on a statewide level, in some cases even county officials were unaware of many ethnic organizations at the local level. Furthermore, several ethnic organizations also expressed their desire to have access to such a directory and have information about their organization available to others. Agreeing that it was a necessary first step, the Committee changed its focus to creating a directory.

Building on these early efforts of the Committee which were coordinated through the Institute for World Affairs at UW-Milwaukee, the Max Kade Institute took up the task of preparing the directory. Committee members compiled various lists of ethnic organizations. Questionnaires were sent to known organizations with the request to make copies and pass them on to additional organizations. UW-Madison graduate student Joshua Hagen, who collected the data, stated, "It's been exciting and somtimes surprising to see the number and variety of ethnic groups and organizations which are active in the state.  The feedback from organization members has been overwhelmingly positive."

Max Kade Institute librarian, Annie Reinhardt, formatted the data into a searchable directory and uploaded it to the World Wide Web, also providing links to to other sites throughout the state, including governmental and educational sites, homepages of ethnic groups; and links to related directories, such as the minority business directory. Changes and additions to the database can be made as needed, allowing the directory to be kept current and grow as additional organizations are added.

It is the Committee's hope that the Directory will serve a number of needs:

• allow easier and more immediate coopera-tion and collaboration within particular ethnic groups, whether locally, regionally or statewide;
• facilitate cooperation and collaboration among organizations from different ethnic groups, to gain an understanding both of the State's diversity and to move towards finding common ground;
• assist civic leaders, educators and members of the media in contacting particular ethnic organizations;
• encourage individual contact to ethnic organizations.

The Ethnic Heritage Committee should continue to play a  role in the evolution of the Directory, in  identifying additional organizations to be included in it, in promoting its existence, and in reviewing the type of information to be contained in future updates of the Directory.  The Committee can also play an important role in identifying potential sources of funding to maintain the electronic Directory. The Directory is currently on the web server which holds the Sesquicentennial websites at:

If you called recently the Institute, you might have been surprised to hear an unfamiliar voice. Most likely it was Kerstin Kuentzel's. In addition to handling incoming genealogical inquiries and translation, she has recently become the Institute's new program assistant.
On a part time basis, she will

• be responsible for the layout and production of the Friends' Newsletter,
• serve as a receptionist, and
• assist with administrative duties.

While her work days may vary from semester to semester, she will be at the MKI 20+ hours a week. Kerstin is glad that these hours allow her to continue to provide genealogical assistance by appointment.

On October 23-24, 1998, the Family History Conference took place at Monona Terrace in Madison as part of the Sesquicentennial Celebration. Before the doors even opened, most of the 750 tickets had been sold. According to the conference syllabus, its program was designed to "help [...] trace the origins of families that came to Wisconsin as well as to trace families in Wisconsin." Forty different lectures held by extremely qualified speakers tried to meet the needs of genealogical research beginners as well as of those of intermediate level by providing them with research techniques, Wisconsin record sources and repositories, and information about places of origin. Not only descendants of Europeans and East Europeans got their money's worth, but also Native and African Americans. In addition to the lectures themselves, there was a well-attended exhibit hall where some of the most important genealogical societies (including the Max Kade Institute) were represented as well as a number of bookstores.

Due to the generosity of the Friends of the Max Kade Institute, I was able to attend some of the lectures as well. As a means of saying "Thank you," I would like to share some of the information I obtained there with those of you who didn't have the opportunity to be there or who attended other lectures given at the same time.

I was absolutely fascinated by the vividness of two of Helen F. M. Leary's presentations: Spotlight on the Ancestors: Letting Them Be Themselves and Their Time Lines and Family Patterns. During both lectures, she stressed several times that researchers always have to keep in mind that their ancestors were human beings, not just names on a record. These ancestors interacted with other people just the way we do, and their lives followed an orderly pattern from birth to death just like ours, only bound by the restrictions of their time. As thorough researchers, we have to analyze each stage of our ancestor`s life, always asking ourselves whether or not this or that was really possible, whether or not a certain pattern makes sense. One can often discover overlapping information by analyzing and comparing collected data from different records and from different persons who had to be in contact with one another during a certain event. For example, at the time of conception, a child's father must have lived at least in the same county as the child's mother, or at birth, at least the child's mother had to be present. Each life pattern is unique; each timeline has its own characteristics and is affected by a variety of circumstances, such as religious background, social status, historical events, etc. Leary demonstrated how to create timelines for each census category, and how to find out more about an ancestor by simply counting back to birth and forward to death. She never tired of emphasizing that it is extremely crucial to keep detailed source lists for everything in order to find at a later date where our information originated.

In her lecture Look again! What did you miss? Patricia Law Hatcher pointed this out as well. She tried to make us aware of the most common errors researchers commit, such as looking for an answer when we should look for a clue instead. Her advice in short: "Use common sense, look at all the pieces of the puzzle and look at them from different perspectives".

The Records of Old Settlers' Organizations presented by Paula Stuart Warren provided knowledge about valuable sources for finding an ancestor's place of origin and much more. Old settlers' organizations were often found in frontier areas. Some of them were highly structured, with a constitution and by-laws, while others were completely unstructured. Their records can often be found on microfilm in libraries listed under different names such as Pioneers of, Old Timers Picnic, Association of Pioneers of, Old Settlers Club, etc. Old newspapers and county histories are good sources of information about settlers' organizations in a particular geographical area of interest. Manuscript collections like the one in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin are according to Warren "gold mines" for discovering records of these organizations. For lack of space, I will only mention NUCMC (=National Union Catalogue of Manuscript Collections), a manuscript cataloguing program that is available online: http://lcweb.loc.gov/coll/nucmc.

Speaking of computers: Jennifer and Blaine Schmidt's lecture Computers and genealogy: From A-Z provided the listener among other things with a large number of online informa-tion, the most important of which I would like to pass on to you. Those of you who don't have Internet access at home should remember that most libraries have computers set up for their clientele that you can use anytime you want.

If you are looking for a hard-to-find out-of-print-book, check out the following Web site: http://www.abebooks.com

Cyndi's List contains 40 000 genealogy related addresses, and you can access it through: http://www.cyndislist.com

Online news groups and mailing lists to which you can subscribe are excellent tools for posting queries publicly (news groups) or privately (mailing lists): http://www.rootsweb.com/~jfuller/gen_mail.html

The Rootsweb contains half a million surnames and access to this website is free: http://www.rootsweb.com

The following website offers information about libraries, archives, courts, access to cemetery data and about the possibility of posting free queries. Please keep in mind that volunteers created and maintain this website. If you think you have information that could help others with their research, your contribution to this site would be highly appreciated. You access it at: http://www.usgenweb.com

In conclusion, the speakers pointed out that if possible we should utilize as a secondary source of information the genealogy related CD ROMs and software packages that come almost daily onto the market.

In The Most Priceless Heritage: Your Family Health History, James W. Warren elaborated the crucial importance of genetic history in your doctor's effort to diagnose your condition or disease correctly. According to Warren, we owe it to ourselves as well as to future generations to research our ancestors' health histories as thoroughly as possible and to pass these important records on to our children. The right way to do this is to start with ourselves and our current condition(s) and continue working back generation by generation through our ancestors' histories. I will mention here only two essential online sources for this kind of research. One is Cyndi's List (see address above), the other one is the site of the National Genealogical Society: http://www.ngsgenealogy.org/

It is my hope that this report has given you new ideas about worthwhile sources you can pursue and about what you should be doing differently in your research method. If you have the feeling you missed something by not attending this year's event, be consoled, there is always a next time. The next conference will be in February, 2000. See you then!

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Upcoming MKI Events: February 3, 1999 at MKI: "German-American Immigrants and the Abolition of Slavery" by Prof. Hartmut Keil, German Historical Institute March 27, 1999 at 10:00 am: Mini-Conference on German Dialects in the Midwest Speakers will include: - Steve Geiger (UW) Hessian Dialect in Sheboygan County - Phil Webber (Central College, Iowa) East Frisian in Iowa - Joe Salmons (UW) How and why German speakers switched to English in Wisconsin   April 28, 1999 at 7:00 pm: "Ach Ya!" James P. Leary on Wisconsin's German American Music

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Platt Düütsch: Low German
A Brief History of the People and Language

by Robert Lee Stockman
Reviewed by Michael C. Lind

This book offers an introduction to the Low German dialects and targets the casual reader as well as the linguist. Though not intended as a technical book, it provides anyone interested in the Low German language(s) with enough linguistic background to significantly add to the understanding of the history of the language and its present situation, especially throughout the United States.

The preface and introduction provide an overview of the work as a whole, its goals, and a brief summary of the concept "Platt Düütsch." Also addressed is the problem of Low German dialects being primarily a spoken language, with written forms perhaps less comprehensible from dialect to dialect.

Chapter Two is a history of the Indo-European peoples and languages. It addresses early European history from the appearance of early man to the emergence of the Indo-Europeans, with descriptions of their homeland and discussion of the Indo-European language and its daughter languages and their similarities. It introduces the non-linguist to the first and second consonant shifts in the Germanic languages, and examples of how each shift did or did not affect each daughter language. To make the relationship clear, the author provides a list of several English words and their Indo-European, Gothic, Old High German, and Standard Modern German counterparts. It should be pointed out to the casual reader, however, that some cognates are left out in favor of the modern English meaning where the word has undergone a semantic shift. For example, the Standard Modern German counterpart for the Gothic 'haitan' is give as 'rufen' despite the fact that Modern German still has the etymologically related ' heißen' Similarly, 'gardi' is given as the Gothic for English 'house' and Modern German 'Haus.' While the Gothic form 'hûs' does exist, it exists only in compounds. However, English and German do have `garden' and 'Garten' which are directly related to 'gardi' though the meaning has shifted.

Chapter Three is the first of the book's two glossaries: English to Platt Düütsch. (The Platt Düütsch to English glossary appears later in Chapter Five). For the sake of consistency the author was left with the unenviable task of selecting one dialect to use as the representative for Low German. The largest problem that can result from this is addressed in Chapter Four: orthography. Since most of these Low German dialects are primarily spoken languages, finding or establishing a consistent writing system is obviously difficult. The beginning of this chapter covers some of these problems and much of the discussion to date on solving them. The remainder is a grammatical analysis of Low German. The last section of the book is a discussion of the various historic and modern Germanic dialects.

This volume does a great service in providing readers without linguistic training an introduction to the study of the Low German dialects as well as some linguistic background. This allows anyone with an interest in Platt Düütsch access to a significant body of work on the subject. An unfortunate number of typographical errors appear in the glossary as well as sparse errors throughout the rest of the text, though these are easily remedied in future editions of the book. Hopefully this book will also serve to increase popular interest in Low German dialects and their preservation as well as scholarly study. As the author points out in his summary, many of these dialects may be nearing extinction, especially in the United States.

The book can be ordered from Platt Düütsch Press, 10748 100th Street, Alto, Mich. 49302.

Click on title to view the article.

We wish to welcome those of you who joined the Friends of the Max Kade Institute in 1998 and we want to thank all of you for your continuing support.