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A ceremony in Munich

Jul24

I never thought of my Jewish great grandmother Lotte (Charlotte) Thannhauser as a holocaust victim. I thought she had just died, long widowed, of old age at 70 (which now seems young to me!). It turns out that she probably lost interest in living after her beloved only child, son Siegfried, was put on leave from his professorship because he was Jewish in April 1933, and so succumbed to her illness.

I have just returned from a trip to Munich where she was honored with a plaque on the current building at the address where she once lived, along with her sister and niece Josie. Many of my American and Israeli cousins were there too. Click here for the story about this on the Münchner Wohnen website. Lotte and her sister Lina’s descendants could be found because I keep a web site with our family history which I have been researching for many many years.

Charlotte Langermann Thannhauser, perhaps her brother Max, and Lina Langermann Thannhauser playing cards

I received an email this past January from a German historian, Dr. Christiane Fritsche, who was researching the residents of the building my great grandmother Lotte lived in. She found me online. The Munich housing authority (Münchner Wohnen) was planning on adding plaques to the buildings there. They provided Dr. Fritsche with a group of interns who were assigned to do the research. I forwarded her email to my double third cousin Nava in Israel because her great grandmother Lina, the sister of Lotte, was truly a holocaust victim. She did not want to leave Germany until it was too late.

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Happy 250th to the country my ancestors came to

Jul4

Twelve years ago I wrote a post here thanking this country for taking my mother and her parents in (click here to read it). Today on the 250th, I want to honor my hard-working Norwegian ancestors, who came in the late 1800s.

My father, Larry Munson, with his Dad, Lawrence J. Munson in about 1940

Below are some excerpts from letters my Norwegian grandfather, born in Christiansand, wrote many years later to his son. He describes his emigration at the age of 6 with his family and their arrival in Brooklyn, N.Y., where there was an enclave of Norwegian immigrants. (click here for all the letters.)

What America was I did not know, but I had imbibed enough of family talk to realize it was a land of plenty and an interesting place to go to.
[…]
My first impression was naturally that of wonder at everything new and strange. It was a great adventure into new and different conditions. My second reaction was one I shared with my mother – that of disappointment at the dirt and filth in Brooklyn in the summer of 1884. Goats were walking the streets eating the paper that littered the street.
[…]

Munson family in 1909 celebrating 25 years in America

My mother […] pictured the U.S. as wealthy and prosperous, and here was poverty and unrestrained drinking.
[…]
In our little Norsetown the streets were clean and in almost every house you would see potted geraniums or other flowers in the front windows. There were many poor people but they were clean and orderly, and there was no public display of poverty.
[…]
My mother with her family of eight children felt she was too busy to learn a new language, and the children did all the shopping. It was only later on as she would hear the children glibly jabber on in this new tongue, that she wanted to know more of this new language. Her children used English among ourselves – especially when we did not want mother to know of our exploits.

My grandfather would later marry a piano student of his, the daughter of Norwegian immigrants (who totally approved!). He wrote about their courtship in his diary.

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Further experiments with AI and genealogical documents

May23

A recent 2nd cousin DNA match (click here for that story) inspired me to explore German records from Bavaria. So I decided to try AI to read the handwriting and translate it. First however, I did some more work on my Norwegians.

My home page at Claude

There is more than one free AI out there, so I ran an experiment. First I submitted a not great scan to all three of the better known ones, Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini. This is what I found:

  • Claude told me it was hard to read and only gave me a partial.
  • ChatGPT made stuff up that sounded totally plausible, but did not seem to be anything like the original Norwegian.
  • Gemini made an effort to translate it and did well, but organized it into bullet items.

So my new method is to upload the same document to Claude and Gemini and merge the result. One thing I like about both of them is that they remember my recent efforts in the left hand sidebars (on Gemini ask for the sidebar in settings). So far I have not used either one heavily enough to be asked to upgrade to a paid version, unlike ChatGPT which has already requested that.

Next I tried some handwritten German documents. In my opinion Gemini did the best job. Read on for how each AI performed.

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Working with the Norwegian Farmbooks and AI

Apr30

My past process to get a translation of what a Norwegian farm book says about my ancestors and their farm was somewhat laborious. First I made a good scan of the page, then I used a Norwegian OCR program to get the text extracted, and finally I asked google to translate that resulting text. Often the result sounded stilted and certain words did not translate correctly, like farm (“pa”) would be garden. Click here for my past post about that process. 

Today I tried Claude AI on a few not so great photos of pages from my copy of the Etne-soga farmbooks for a distant relative and wow, just wow. Not only was the process much easier, just upload a photo, but the translation was way better and more informative.

Here is an excerpt from my exchange with Claude AI:

Green text is added to this exchange with Claude AI

 

When you click the down arrow it even explains the Norwegian abbreviations! This is what it told me.

Notes:

“f.” = født (born), “d.” = død (died)
“bygsla” = leased/rented farmland (a common tenure arrangement in old Norway)
“lensmannen” = the local bailiff/sheriff
“rdlr.” = riksdaler, the currency of the time
“Lausøyret” = movable personal property/chattels
“leiglending” = a tenant farmer who leased land rather than owning it

The text cuts off at the bottom of page 573 — there is more to the entry on the following page.

I am amazed that Claude knew what the document was (a Norwegian genealogical record) and could give me information like that about common abbreviations and words. Previously Google translate had used “built” for “bygsla” as well as other slight inaccuracies.

This was all free! I would be happy to pay a small subscription fee for such a terrific service.

I have also used Claude AI for handwritten German records. Some it did well. Others it found harder but it always told me why, discussing that horrible medieval German script.

AI is bringing in a wonderful new era for us family history researchers.

My Newly Found Half Second Cousin Once Removed

Dec19

A few months ago, my family had a good DNA match (about 151 cm for my aunt) at 23andme to our Bavarian side. This was Mary, who had been adopted as a baby back in 1950 from a Munich orphanage. She knew her birth mother’s name but not her father’s. She had no other significant matches at 23andme besides my family, so we needed to get her into more DNA databases to figure this out.

Great Grandfather Benedict Reiner

I sent her an Ancestry kit I had on hand and ordered a MyHeritage kit for her as well. Germany does not have very many people who have tested their DNA so typically my matches on those lines are Americans with Bavarian ancestors. However, there are a few tested Germans at MyHeritage.

While we waited for the new test results, I had her upload her DNA to GEDmatch so I could compare her to my known German cousins there. To my surprise, she matched my half second cousin in Bavaria at 91 cM. This is a line I have not researched deeply. I was hoping she matched my grandmother’s other side which I have much more information on. Luckily I am in touch with that cousin’s granddaughter Katharina, who enjoys doing genealogy. We found each other on GENI because she is descended from my great grandfather Benedict Reiner via a different partner (click here for that story)

Benedict’s mother Anna Reiner had several partners and at least two husbands so my plan was to start by building the trees of her other descendants. Naturally I fired off an email to Katharina and asked her what she knew. She sent me quite a bit of information and got involved in helping. She said to me “Now I remember why genealogy brings me so much joy — it’s just so fascinating!” Sadly many of Anna’s children had died before reaching an age to have children themselves and only one had moved to Munich.

The Ancestry results came in and Mary had two good matches (167 cM and 160 cM) who did not match each other or me, although one had a whole family of testers, all matching. Next I copied the Bavarians from their trees into Mary’s tree and then built their trees further back. There were some surnames of interest ….

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